[pulseaudio-discuss] HAL support obsoleted by new udev code (DISTRO MAINTAINERS, READ THIS!)

[Lennart Poettering]

Heya!

Just wanted to mention that PA in git now can use udev instead of HAL
to discover audio devices. This is part of the "HALsecotomy" that's
currently going on.

A bit of functionality is (temporarily) lost however: in the udev
world there is no replacement for HAL's session switching/ACL
management yet. The new code in PA however is written in a way that
should just work when we add this to udev later on. However the
lacking ACL handling makes things very racy right now and you might
need to add yourself to "audio" group, as a temporary workaround. We
mostly figured out how session switching/ACL management should be
working, it's just a matter that Jon and Kay need to implement that.

Please note that this requires kernel 2.6.30 to work. Only on 2.6.30
and newer non-priviliged processes can listen for udev events. This
could be fixed in libudev by calling a little suid binary that passes
on those events to the library when running on older kernels, but so
far nobody cared enough to do that. If you care, then I am sure that
Kay would be willing to merge a patch.

So in summary:

- the new udev logic needs kernel >= 2.6.30 

- the new udev logic needs udev >= 141

- the new udev logic needs udev-extras from today's git.

If you don't have that either use the old HAL mess or simply
upgrade... ;-)

And distributors, please make sure to add these versioned dependencies
to your PA packages. Also, consider passing --disable-hal when
building PA.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4