How to get info into HAL?

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sat, Jul 15, 2006 at 01:12:59PM -0700, Bob Smith wrote:

> While what I said about assumptions is still true, the
> immediate problem was that I had three days to figure out
> HAL and add a new (non-ACPI) battery to it.  At the end
> of three days I still had no idea how to start and my two
> posts to this mailing list were unanswered.  It wasn't
> footprint -- is was the documentation.  A "use the source"
> mantra is fine for core contributors but I just wanted to
> add what should have been a very simple device.

Given deadlines, that's entirely understandable. Thanks for the comments 
on documentation - I think it's pretty reasonable to complain about that 
at the moment.

Entirely unrelatedly, I'm currently involved in discussion over the 
right way to expose battery information for the One Laptop Per Child 
hardware, since it won't be using ACPI. It would be preferable to extend 
this to a generic battery class for the kernel rather than coming up 
with yet another ad-hoc interface. Knowing what functionality your 
battery exposes (such as capacity, last charged capacity, current 
discharge rate, that sort of thing) would be helpful in figuring out 
what this interface should look like, if you can let us know without 
giving away any corporate secrets or anything?

Thanks,
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org