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The X.Org Plans For Moving Away From HAL

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  • The X.Org Plans For Moving Away From HAL

    Phoronix: The X.Org Plans For Moving Away From HAL

    To address the questions that have been coming up frequently regarding the X.Org Server and the plans to stop using HAL, Sun's Alan Coopersmith has created a new Wiki page called XorgHAL. On this Wiki page, Alan explains how this hardware abstraction layer for Linux and other operating systems is currently in use for finding input devices, being notified of input device hot-plugging, mapping system input devices, and setting input device options. X.Org has been using HAL since X Server 1.4 and it continues to be used in the most recent X Server 1.7 series, but the migration away from HAL will likely be completed in time for X Server 1.8...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    devicekit

    did the X guys consider using devicekit? what's the issue there?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by garytr24 View Post
      did the X guys consider using devicekit? what's the issue there?
      There is no DeviceKit support for input devices, which is why the DeviceKit developers flat out told X.Org not to bother (and that was before they decided to stop DeviceKit as well, moving again to udisks/upower/etc.)

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      • #4
        Er… what!? Has DeviceKit been abandoned already?

        All this is plain crazy imho - I don't see why HAL was such a bad piece of software to begin with. It's an established quasi-standard that managed to settle, and it was even available on non-Linux (at least on FreeBSD, to my knowledge) systems. Now everyone's going back to reinvent the wheel to make bootup a tenth of a second faster. Am I the only one thinking that's kinda stupid?

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        • #5
          Originally posted by alanc View Post
          There is no DeviceKit support for input devices, which is why the DeviceKit developers flat out told X.Org not to bother (and that was before they decided to stop DeviceKit as well, moving again to udisks/upower/etc.)
          What? DeviceKit was dumped already? You've got to be frakin kidding me :|

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          • #6
            At the very, very least, put the input handling code into a library, put the device files into something non-X-specific, and make it reasonable for other projects to reuse the data instead of making yet another X-only abstraction that has nothing X-specific about it. :/

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            • #7
              What do you mean by "dumped"?
              Afaik it's just being renamed to udisks:

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              • #8
                Originally posted by colo View Post
                Er? what!? Has DeviceKit been abandoned already?
                See the threads on devkit-devel this week, such as this post - they renamed the projects, including all the functions, libraries, binaries, dbus addresses and other interfaces,
                so all software using DeviceKit will have to be updated to the new names.

                Am I the only one thinking that's kinda stupid?
                No, you're not.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by colo View Post
                  Er? what!? Has DeviceKit been abandoned already?

                  All this is plain crazy imho - I don't see why HAL was such a bad piece of software to begin with. It's an established quasi-standard that managed to settle, and it was even available on non-Linux (at least on FreeBSD, to my knowledge) systems. Now everyone's going back to reinvent the wheel to make bootup a tenth of a second faster. Am I the only one thinking that's kinda stupid?

                  Doesn't it make you wish there was a "Reach out and bitchslap someone" button in mailing lists?

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                  • #10
                    I'm wondering about this: Ubuntu 10.04 is about to adopt X Server 1.7 and completely drop HAL, but since HAL will be completely dropped only in 1.8, what is Ubuntu gonna do about that?

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