hal doesn't find all devices

[Christian Krause]

Hi,

On my system I've discovered that hald behaves sometimes unreliable. I
want to share with you what I've discovered so far:

1. hald doesn't always has all devices in its database:
E.g if hald is started before the acpi modules are loaded, there are
no entries for the batteries and the AC adapters. But if I restart
hald, it will recognize all of these devices.

2. When attaching an music player (hotplugging the USB device), hald
sometimes recognizes the device completly (all partitions of the mass
storage device, all filesystems on these partitions, even the
information of 10-usb-music-players.fdi like the keys
"portable_audio_player", ... can be found in hal's database). But
sometimes, only the USB device is recognized, sometimes the USB
device, the partitions, but not "portable_audio_player", ..

These problems look like some race-conditions or something like that.
Because the problems are not very reproduceable, I think it makes no
sense to file reports with such "fuzzy" descriptions.

Nevertheless I want that these problem be fixed. ;-) That's why I want
to ask you 2 questions:

1. Please can you advise me how should I start looking for the
problems? Or do you already have some ideas, what could cause such
unpredictable behaviour? Where should I place some debug output?

2. As far as I figured out so far, hald is simply called by udev. Are
there other communication paths between the kernel and hald? I've
already tried to have a deeper look at the doc directory of the hal
package, but it seems to be a little bit outdated.


Thank you very much in advance for you help.

Best regards,
Christian