HAL and Smartcards

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2007-01-15 at 09:16 +0100, Sebastian Trüg wrote:
> Hi Hardware gurus,
> 
> at Mandriva we are planning proper Smartcard integration into KDM, i.e. it 
> should change to ask for a PIN once the card is inserted.
> 
> We thought that the best way to do this is through HAL. Let HAL handle card 
> insertion and removal events.
> 
> Are there any plans regarding Smartcard support in HAL? And if not: are there 
> any objections against including it?

We wanted to do this at Red Hat for FC6 and RHEL5 based on pscsd daemon
and the associated plug-ins for Mozilla NSS but it turned out to be a
lot of work and there were deadlines involved etc. 

As a result, pscsd wasn't modified to listen to HAL and it kept using
it's own, uhm, mechanisms for smart card detection easily making it #1
in the hall of shame of "who/what is doing all this file i/o? (aka
stupid userspace)"

 http://berrange.com/personal/diary/2006/11/whowhat-is-doing-all-this-file-io-aka

I know Ray worked on this so I'm adding him to the Cc to ask for plans
on whether this is going to happen sometime soon.

     David