LWN.net Logo

Keeping up with the Kroah-Hartmans (who upgrade without notice)

Keeping up with the Kroah-Hartmans (who upgrade without notice)

Posted Aug 3, 2006 12:57 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
In reply to: Keeping up with the Kroah-Hartmans (who upgrade without notice) by xoddam
Parent article: New kernels and old distributions

>udev and HAL are maintained as part of the kernel source

Calibrate me if I'm off, but udev is linux-specific, whereas HAL is a Gnome desktop component, and therefore goes anywhere X goes, no?


(Log in to post comments)

Keeping up with the Kroah-Hartmans (who upgrade without notice)

Posted Aug 3, 2006 14:57 UTC (Thu) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link]

(a) HAL stands for 'Hardware Abstraction Layer'. According to its website, HAL currently depends on Linux 2.6.15 or later, as well as on udev and D-Bus. While the idea behind an abstraction layer is obviously in line with trying to get it to work on multiple backend platforms, in practice, HAL is presently tied to Linux.

(b) HAL is desktop-agnostic. It's not part of the Gnome desktop platform. HAL is hosted on Freedesktop.org. Several of the projects that participate in the Freedesktop.org effort make active use of HAL, notably KDE and Gnome.

(c) HAL does not depend on the X Window System.

Couple of links:
HAL website: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fhal
HAL 0.5.8 Specification: http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/hal/hal/doc/spec/hal-spec.h...

Keeping up with the Kroah-Hartmans (who upgrade without notice)

Posted Aug 4, 2006 17:36 UTC (Fri) by bfeeney (subscriber, #6855) [Link]

Actually there are ongoing efforts to port HAL to FreeBSD and to
OpenSolaris (the latter being headed by the Nexenta people I believe).
It's unlikely to remain a Unix thing for very long. In the meantime, KDE 4
will feature the Solid library to handle hot-plugging: it'll use HAL where
available, and system specific code otherwise. I don't think Gnome has any
specific plans as yet.

Copyright © 2012, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds