According to Gilbert E. Detillieux:
According to millward:
What's kudzu ? I've read the man mount but there's no kudzu there. What does it do?
It's a utility that runs at system startup to check your hardware configuration, and allow you to setup/configure any new or changed hardware.
If your system will be stable after you've set it up, you can always disable it as a startup service to speed things up a bit...
chkconfig kudzu off
However, I like to leave it on, so it catches any hardware changes I made, or anything that may "mysteriously" have changed.
This still doesn't explain what "kudzu" means as an option in /etc/fstab. It's not documented in fstab(5) or kudzu(8) either. A quick Google search for "etc fstab kudzu" did turn up this page, though:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.1-Manual/release-notes/s1-sys...
It seems it's for the automatic management of removable media.