Freedesktop.org's HAL 0.1 Released
Linked by Eugenia Loli on Tue 30th Sep 2003 05:20 UTC
General Development In the dawn of the renovation of freedesktop.org's web site, David Zeuthen announced the release of HAL 0.1. HAL is an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer, as defined by Havoc Pennington's paper. It encompasses a shared library for use in applications, a daemon, a hotplug tool, command line tools and a set of stock device info files. Carlos Perelló Marín also announced the design of a similar concept, but it is expected the two projects to merge. More people are encouraged to join this innovative project. Elsewhere, Gnome's Seth Nickell is giving us a first taste of his effort to replace the Init system.
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Misunderstanding
by Kevin on Tue 30th Sep 2003 20:09 UTC

I think there is a misunderstanding about the purpose of this HAL project.

As far as I understood from following the discussion on the mailinglist, HAL is for discovering devices (and device state changes), checking their capabilties and doing simple commands (like locking a CD drive bay, requesting unmount)

Any heavy work will be done directly through appropriate facilities (libraries, direct device access, etc.)

Of course most of it could be implemented at Kernel level and maybe the Linux implementation will do this sometimes.
But one has to define it as an extra layer or one looses portability of DEs to other platforms, like *BSD, commerical Unix, etc.

Nobody at freedesktop.org will sacrifice achievable portability just because some single.platform hack would be a tiny bit faster.