Re: New modules in 2.14

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

(maybe slightly off-topic for desktop-devel-list but I seem to
ramble a lot tonight and it may be of general interest. Sorry)

On Jan 19, 2006, at 8:42 PM, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> HAL doesn't work [yet] on *BSD, either.  I have started work on the
> FreeBSD port, and I hope to have something working by next month.

That would be most welcome! At this point it's probably useful to
point out that you can add functionality one at a time. E.g. initially
you may just add code that detects batteries and provides e.g.
Suspend() and Hibernate() methods and, bingo, g-p-m should
work out of the box for you. Given HAL already should compile
on FreeBSD (it does so on Solaris IIRC), albeit with an empty
device list, this should be pretty straight-forward given that
the FreeBSD kernel / core userland provides the appropriate
interfaces (on Linux we e.g. rely on /proc). I think the initial
imlementation for ACPI batteries in HAL took about an
evening or so (see hald/linux2/acpi.c)

I don't want to scare you... but it's probably useful to point out
that most of the effort put into HAL up until now have been in
making sense of the brokeness that the Linux 2.6 kernel have
to offer. Though, to be fair (and since I know Alan reads this :-),
many Linux kernel developers indeed have listened to both
mine and Kay's complaints so things are not as bad as they
used to be. Of course, the kernel people can only fix that much,
there's still broken BIOS and ACPI bits out there and this is
probably going to affect the battery side of the FreeBSD
port too. Unless your kernel side of things sucks less than
e.g. on Linux.

Cheers,
David