[NTLUG:Discuss] The Linux capability that reveals your system

[Ted Gould]

On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 14:43 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 14:34 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 23:17 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> > > hal is an abstraction.  A layer.  But, when available, it's fairly
> > > complete... but not necessarily complete.
> > > 
> > > Just fyi.
> > 
> > Oh!  I didn't know that, I've never noticed anything missing in HAL,
> > what am I missing?
> 
> Depends.  Basically anything for which drivers don't  communicate
> something onto the dbus about the device.

That's not entirely correct.  Drivers can't send something to DBus as
DBus is in user space and the drivers are in kernel space.  The drivers
communicate through sysfs and HAL picks that up.

> With that said, there are some pollers in the hal daemon I believe
> to try to find certain things (polling being... in general, a bad
> thing).  My point is that it's NOT the source of the info, but
> a populated area.

I think that the only polling in HAL is for drivers that only
support /proc and don't yet support /sys which has much better support
for signaling and providing information up to userspace.

Is there any information that you haven't been able to find in HAL?
I've never run across anything that wasn't there.

		--Ted