16 lines
805 B
Text
16 lines
805 B
Text
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What is the point of HAL?
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To merge information from various sources such that desktop applications can
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locate and use hardware devices. The point is that the exact set of
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information to merge varies by device and bus type. In order to do this, we
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need to define a format for the information, hence the HAL specification.
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We may read some stuff from the hardware itself, then add some info provided
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by the kernel, then add some metadata from some systemwide files, then add
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some data that has been obtained by the desktop and stored per-user, then
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look at some blacklist, and finally we have a complete picture of everything
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known about that particular device.
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An extra value is that we can do this in an operating system independent way.
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Stuff like this is important to the major desktop environments.
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