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: 2010-03-23
- Percentage of completion: 80%
Detailed Description
Packages in the desktop spin:
| Package name | Status | Bug reports or discussions |
|---|---|---|
| rhythmbox | done | |
| gstreamer-plugins-good | done | |
| gnome-power-manager | done | |
| cheese | done | |
| evolution | done | |
| gvfs | done | |
| gvfs-obexftp | done | |
| gnome-vfs2 | WONTFIX | Applications should be removing their use of gnome-vfs2 and use gvfs instead. Direct gnome-vfs2 rdeps: dia (DONE upstream) |
| gnome-pilot | TODO | |
| system-setup-keyboard | done | Used for keymap selection |
| gdm | done | |
| 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.