Porting HAL to FreeBSD

[Robert Love]

On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 15:26 -0400, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:

> Given the recent discussions on including Utopia in GNOME 2.8, I thought
> it prudent to take a look at what would be involved to get HAL working
> on FreeBSD.  The Linux 2.6 extensions to HAL rely heavily on sysfs. 
> Would it be possible to port HAL to FreeBSD without requiring sysfs? 
> That is, does HAL itself require sysfs, or is just the Linux 2.6
> implementation of HAL that uses it?  If an application supports HAL,
> does it assume sysfs exists or libsysfs is present?  What other tips can
> you provide me on porting HAL?  Thanks.

David can probably provide a lot more tips and help on porting HAL to
FreeBSD (he has expressed interest in it before), but I can answer your
other questions.

HAL proper does not require sysfs or any other Linux-specific features.
Sysfs is used in the system-dependent part of the Linux implementation.
The FreeBSD-specific chunk of HAL is free to use whatever it has to in
order to build the device tree and the device-to-class relation.

The sysfs dependency does not leak to apps - f.e., apps do not require
libsysfs or sysfs.

Best of luck!  I think we all look forward to a FreeBSD port.

	Robert Love



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