HAL 0.5.x & networking

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 08:23 -0700, Sean Meiners wrote:
> I would agree that fixing the drivers is ideal, but unfortunately,  
> it's not a luxury we have.  There are too many drivers for us to fix  
> ourselves, and we can't afford to wait until someone else fixes them  
> all for us :(  If we (read: Linspire) are going to use HAL to help  
> manage the network devices we need all devices to work (even the  
> crappy ones).  So I guess I'll just keep my patch in place on our  
> package until all the drivers work properly.

Well, with recent kernels (2.6.11 or later) this works pretty well. I
don't think that Fedora carries any extra patches in that department. Of
course, if you ship a lot of out-of-tree drivers it's a slightly
different scenario.

> Also, I forgot to mention, even after I removed the device check the  
> airo device still wasn't showing up at first.  It turns out that  
> there is a bit of a race condition.  For some reason there is a delay  
> between when HAL receives the event telling it that the card has been  
> inserted and when /sys/class/net/<if> gets populated.  So even though  
> the address file does get created for the interface, it's not  
> available when net_add goes looking for it causing it to not find the  
> device.  I added a limited retry around hal_util_set_string_from_file  
> (d, "net.address", sysfs_path, "address") with sleep(1)'s between  
> each iteration and it works fine, although I'd prefer a less brute- 
> force solution.

Are you using udevd as the hotplug multiplexer? Because you need to do
that and that requires udev >= 050 or something (it's in the hal release
notes, file NEWS in the tarball)

 [davidz at daxter ~]$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
 /sbin/udevsend

If you're not using this, that would explain the things you're seeing.

HTH,
David


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