Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:48:24 +0100 From: Dominic Fandrey <kamikaze@bsdforen.de> To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: DeviceKit development? Message-ID: <4AEEB8F8.4080007@bsdforen.de>
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This mail is a statement of a common opinion in a German BSD community. In depth information would be much appreciated, currently all our understanding and thus everything that follows is based on rumours. The German community is pretty upset about HAL and all the troubles we've had with it. In our eyes HAL is a polling nightmare that is technically obsolete because the FreeBSD kernel offers a register/notify model via devd, which is obviously superior. I.e. it only causes system load when an event occurs, as opposed to all the time with polling. Also many users used to have stability issues with HAL. I know of none, currently, but the common wisdom in the German community is that life without HAL is a better life. Seeing that the Linux world has trouble with HAL, too and appears to be abandoning it, it becomes necessary to implement the replacement DeviceKit, which appears to be going on as a part of porting Gnome3. Something which I have no first hand information about. While DeviceKit addresses the messy interface issue of HAL I am afraid that it still relies on the same polling methods as HAL. So it might prove as troublesome as HAL. What we wish for is a separate implementation that, though offering the same interface as DeviceKit, should be tightly coupled with FreeBSD facilities like devd. This would hopefully avoid the access right violations and stability issues that have been raised by HAL in the past. Of course, this would be a mighty endeavour and requires a stable DeviceKit API. But it appears to me (and others as well), that it might well prove to be the least troublesome path in the long run. -- A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
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