From Fedora Project Wiki

< Features

Revision as of 17:44, 6 May 2010 by Nsoranzo (talk | contribs) (→‎Detailed Description: gnome-power-manager is done upstream)


HAL Removal

Summary

HAL is a behemoth, do-it-all, daemon to access hardware. It is now obsoleted by udisks (né DeviceKit-disks) and upower (né DeviceKit-power), as well as libudev for device discovery.

This feature tracks the removal of HAL in the Fedora Desktop spin.

See also:

GNOME upstream tracker

Ubuntu tracker

Debian tracker

Note that gnome-vfs2 still relies on HAL, and is dragged in through libgnomeui. So removing the gnome-vfs2, or libgnomeui dependencies from applications also helps towards that goal.

Owner

  • email: bnocera@redhat.com

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 40
  • Last updated: 2010-03-23
  • Percentage of completion: 80%


Detailed Description

Packages in the desktop spin:

Package name Status Bug reports or discussions
rhythmbox done upstream bug 604186
gstreamer-plugins-good done
gnome-power-manager done upstream bug 593933
cheese done
evolution done
gvfs done upstream bug 586410
gvfs-obexftp done upstream bug 586411 and upstream bug 511671
gnome-vfs2 WONTFIX Applications should be removing their use of gnome-vfs2 and use gvfs instead. Direct gnome-vfs2 rdeps:

dia
firefox
thunderbird
evolution
gnome-python2-applet
gnome-python2-gnome
gnome-python2-gnomevfs
gnome-python2-libegg
im-chooser
inkscape
libgnome
libgnomeui
xine-lib-extras
xulrunner
dasher (DONE upstream)
gnome-pilot (DONE upstream)
planner (DONE upstream)

gnome-pilot TODO
system-setup-keyboard done Used for keymap selection
gdm done upstream bug 572765, bug 567432
xorg-x11-server-Xorg done
shotwell done
xine-lib done dependency on gnome-vfs2 removed
libmtp done using hal-filesystem
epiphany done Removed obsolete gnome-vfs2-devel dependency
pm-utils TODO (in progress) waiting for upstream
libgpod done
evolution-data-server done
libfprint done using hal-filesystem

Important packages outside the desktop spin:

Package name Status Bug reports or discussions
gimp TODO upstream bug
hplip TODO upstream bug
k3b done
kdelibs TODO Solid requires HAL in the KDE platform 4.4. According to upstream, a u* backend will be available in 4.5 at the earliest, but more likely 4.6.
libvirt done
smolt TODO

Benefit to Fedora

Faster boot-up, and removal of obsoleted technology.

Scope

Loads of applications require HAL itself, or libhal. Applications should not rely on HAL, or libhal being available.

How To Test

Need to test:

  • rpm -e hal or yum erase hal
  • Check that nothing gets removed because it depends on hal
  • Check that applications that access hardware still work as before

User Experience

  • Faster boot-up
  • Possibly faster applications startup when switching from libhal to libgudev for device enumeration

Dependencies

  • See description

Contingency Plan

  • Still ship HAL. If the last thing that depends on hal is gnome-power-manager for the backlight support, we can stop running hal as a service at boot and make it dbus-activated instead.

Documentation

N/A

Release Notes

  • Fedora now does not ship with the HAL daemon, and libhal by default. If a specific application require libhal to function, please file a bug against it to be ported to the new technology.

Comments and Discussion