From Fedora Project Wiki


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

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: 2009-12-09
  • Percentage of completion: 10%


Detailed Description

Packages in the desktop spin:

Package name Status Bug reports or discussions
rhythmbox partially done bug 604186
gstreamer-plugins-good done
gnome-power-manager TODO (removed, but regressed) XRandR brightness settings do not work on all drivers, and don't work with platform brightness settings
cheese done
evolution done
gvfs TODO bug 586410
gvfs-obexftp TODO bug 586411 and bug 511671
gnome-vfs2 WONTFIX Applications should be removing their use of gnome-vfs2 and use gvfs instead. Direct gnome-vfs2 rdeps:
libgnome
libgnomeui
xulrunner
gnome-pilot
im-chooser
dasher
planner
firefox
evolution
gnome-python2-gnomevfs
gnome-python2-gnome
gnome-python2-applet
gnome-python2-libegg
gnome-pilot TODO
fedora-setup-keyboard TODO Used for keymap selection
gdm TODO bug 572765
xorg-x11-server-Xorg done upstream
shotwell done upstream upstream ticket: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/999
xine-lib done dependency on gnome-vfs2 removed
libmtp TODO Just need to remove the fdi file
epiphany done Removed obsolete gnome-vfs2-devel dependency
pm-utils TODO In progress upstream
libgpod TODO upstream work
evolution-data-server done

Important packages outside the desktop spin:

Package name Status Bug reports or discussions
libvirt done
gimp 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