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:
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
- Name: Bastien Nocera
- email: bnocera@redhat.com
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 42
- Last updated: 2010-01-13
- Percentage of completion: 35%
Detailed Description
Packages in the desktop spin:
| Package name | Status | Bug reports or discussions |
|---|---|---|
| rhythmbox | 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 | done | bug 586410 |
| gvfs-obexftp | done | 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: dasher |
| gnome-pilot | TODO | |
| fedora-setup-keyboard | TODO | Used for keymap selection |
| gdm | done | 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 | done | using hal-filesystem |
| epiphany | done | Removed obsolete gnome-vfs2-devel dependency |
| pm-utils | TODO | In progress upstream |
| libgpod | TODO | upstream work |
| evolution-data-server | done | |
| libfprint | done | using hal-filesystem |
Important packages outside the desktop spin:
| Package name | Status | Bug reports or discussions |
|---|---|---|
| libvirt | done | |
| gimp | TODO | |
| hplip | TODO | upstream bug |
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.