[illumos-Developer] HAL

[Alan Coopersmith]

Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 09:11 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> Owen Shepherd wrote:
>>> Isn't Hal deprecated by it's author anyway? I'f my memory serves me
>>> correctly then it should be a goal to move off Hal anyway.
>> Yes, but they've only provided replacements for Linux systems, the
>> udisks/upower/etc. series of extensions to the Linux udev framework.
>> (DeviceKit was an interim step to those, but they killed DeviceKit
>>  as well in favor of the u* interfaces, and churned through API's
>>  in the process.)
>>
>> Everyone else is on their own or stuck maintaining HAL.
>>
>> To remove HAL, you'd need to provide replacement interfaces for:
>>  - removable media mounting (Tamarack, the vold replacement)
>>  - GNOME interfaces for power management & disks
>> and probably a few others I've forgotten.
>>
>> Moving Xorg on Solaris from HAL to libsysevent for input device
>> hotplug notification and libdevinfo for input device discovery is
>> on my long-term todo list, but again, for now HAL is required there.
>>
> 
> 
> I wonder if an interim step would be to make HAL a consumer of more
> standard interfaces and move it out of illumos and into either JDS or X?
> 
> Alan, do you have any thoughts on that?

We won't be taking it into the X gates I'm responsible for, since we won't
be able to maintain it in the X group, and won't have any need for it once
I finish the work to move us off.   SFW, JDS or the future Userland would
be possibilities I guess, if HAL only relied on stable interfaces - though
again, getting it moved in the Oracle-managed gates requires the team that
is maintaining it to be willing to move or the team owning those gates to
accept responsibility.

> (Its really too bad that we don't have a means to collaborate with
> Oracle here...)

E-mail still works.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System