What is HAL and why should I care?

[michaelrmgreen]

I stumbled on a link (when researching mounting an old ntfs drive) which referred to hal and dbus. I googled the matter and searched at freebsd.org but I am still ignorant.

Please enlighten me using the minimum of other terms I'll have to google etc. Ta.

[SirDice]

HAL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer. It's a system that provides an OS independent way to query hardware (or at least that's what it's supposed to do).

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal

[DutchDaemon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction_layer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbus
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus
hald <<-- appears to missing on man.freebsd.org?
dbus-daemon

[ctaranotte]

and if I may: 2001: A Space Odyssey (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/) :)

[ChickenWing88]

Hal (Hardware Abstraction Layer) is a plat form independent Subsystem included in most operating systems that deals with hard ware management.

[graudeejs]

It's a cause of Great Many Problems (Telling it like it is. I mean it) :D

perhaps one good day it will just work, but probably not today and not tomorrow

[phoenix]

And, if the Fedora Linux devs have their way, HAL will be dead in a year-ish, replaced by DeviceKit (along with PolicyKit, PackageKit, and the other *Kits).

[graudeejs]

Whatever they do I hope they make it KISS compatible and optional....
man if one "good" day HAL die, i can imagine all the s*** that will start all over with X