[OpenIndiana-discuss] HAL replacement

[Apostolos Syropoulos]

>Strictly speaking, Linux udev is highly specific to Linux and not
>intended to be adopted elsewhere, and the Linux devfs it replaced has
>no relation to Solaris devfs. There were bits of DeviceKit that were
>meant to be portable and used udev as a backend on Linux, but
>DeviceKit died.

Hello Albert,

It is true that DeviceKit has died but it has been replaced by UDisks/UPower.
But I did a quick search and I have deduced the following:

1) Xorg needs to be aware of "input hotplugging" in order to be able to detect 
a keyboard or a mouse thar is plugged in. Previously, HAL was responsible for
this. Since HAL is going away, what should take its place? On a typical Linux
system, the Xorg server communicates with udev directly, thus, it seems that
it would make sense to have Xorg communicate with syseventd or something
else, which I am not aware of. Maybe this is what happens alfready, but then 
again, I don't really know.


2) KDE/GNOME/XFCE expect some infrastructure to be able to automount
Disks, USB thunb disks, CDs, DVDs, etc. This was something HAL was doing.
But again we need a replacement and since these DE expect something that
will do the job HAL did. An idea is to "teach" UDisks/UPower to communicate
with syseventd (on Linux it communicates with udev and work is being done
to allow it to communicate with devd on FreeBSD). 

I hope now that is clear what I mean by porting UDisks/Upower.

Best,

A.S.
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Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece