Hal and Xorg output devices

[David Nusinow]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 01:31:59PM -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:59:09 +0200 (IST), Ely Levy
> <elylevy-xserver at cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> > What's wrong with using hal then?
> 
> HAL can layer above the stuff in fbdev, but the mode setting support
> needs to be down at the kernel level to ensure that the PCI bus is
> managed properly. Also X is not the only consumer of video. Just
> because Linux has this architecture it doesn't mean other systems have
> to follow it.

The architecture you described earlier, with a separate client program, matches
the XInput hotplug proposal pretty well. I took a look at the patches to
implement this, and it's the external client that would manage such things, so
the external client daemon could use Hal if it wants (which I think is probably
a good idea) to get the information, and then tell the X server what to do. I'm
not sure whether the X server should give commands back to alter these
settings, but I don't see why it couldn't be done, and let the client daemon
manage things like putting mode setting at the kernel level properly for that
OS.

 - David Nusinow