# What is HAL and why should I care?



## michaelrmgreen (May 18, 2009)

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.


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## SirDice (May 18, 2009)

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


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## DutchDaemon (May 18, 2009)

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(8)  <<-- appears to missing on man.freebsd.org?
dbus-daemon(1)


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## ctaranotte (May 18, 2009)

and if I may: 2001: A Space Odyssey


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## ChickenWing88 (May 28, 2009)

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


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## graudeejs (May 28, 2009)

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

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


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## phoenix (May 28, 2009)

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).


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## graudeejs (May 28, 2009)

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


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