Hello, hal devs. Thank you for the work you do in the community. You efforts are definitely appreciated. I am writing because I have a question about HAL getting OSSv4 support. I am a KDE 4 user and because KDE 4 uses HAL almost exclusively there are a good number of KDE 4 applications that can't use OSSv4. Currently HAL does not have support for OSSv4 and from the research I gathered this is because OSSv4 doesn't have support for sysfs and udev. Danny Kukawka's comment on the HAL mailing list looks to sum it up: <blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">... I taked a look at the source and it looks to me as if there is no sysfs or udev support in this package. IMO we shouldn't add without these essential issues support to HAL for it... </blockquote> source <<a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2008-March/011061.html" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2008-March/011061.html</a>> I'm new to this so please forgive my ignorance but I wasn't aware that HAL has new standards the require drivers to support sysfs and udev. I thought HAL could still implement devices with the need for them. Am I off on this? Could there be? There doesn't seem to be any regular communication from OSS to the HAL mailing list so I decided just to ask the OSS developers why HAL functionality hasn't beed added: <a href="mailto:apriori@dkc-clan.de">apriori@dkc-clan.de</a> said: <blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">...About sysfs and udev. I doubt OSSv4 will ever support the later, because it doesn't want to focus on one Unix type, namely Linux here. It's trying to between the unices, working on most of them without implicitly concentrating on one therefore rejecting any specific technology not strictly tied to the kernel. Supporting sysfs though is a minor task and shouldn't be too hard to implement.... </blockquote> and <a href="mailto:hannu@opensound.com">hannu@opensound.com</a> said: <blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote"> OSS4 doesn't use sysfs or any other Linux only mechanisms. Instead there is an ioctl() interface that works under all operating systems. It's OK if somebody creates a sysfs interface for OSS. However I don't see it necessary. The idea is simple. The application opens /dev/sndstat and calls SNDCTL_SYSINFO (<a href="http://manuals.opensound.com/developer/SNDCTL_SYSINFO.html">http://manuals.opensound.com/developer/SNDCTL_SYSINFO.html</a>). This call returns the number of audio and mixer devices in the system. Then SNDCTL_MIXERINFO and SNDCTL_AUDIOINFO can be used to obtain info about the actual audio and mixer devices. </blockquote> I use OSSv4 for several applications and support for OSSv4 would be very very helpful. Could something be done to get OSSv4 support into HAL? Thank you for taking the time to read this and any thoughts would be appreciated. -- Gen2ly - <a href="http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/">http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/</a>