HAL on FreeBSD

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Wed, 11 May 2005, Juho Vuori wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've been working on porting HAL to FreeBSD for some time now, and decided to 
> announce it in case someone is doing the same thing. There is quite some work 
> involved so I don't want to duplicate anyone's efforts. I've got a 
> preliminary device list built and hotplugging working somehow, but it's all
> still pretty messy.

I'm working on it, but I just started, so you're farther along than I am.

>
> One of the difficult decisions involved in this is where to mount all the new 
> filesystem devices that gets plugged into the system, and I'd like to have 
> someone's opinion on this who is more involved in FreeBSD than me. The thing 
> is, it is possible someone stick a new USB memory to the system without it 
> having an entry in /etc/fstab. HAL (if asked to do so), may in this case add 
> an entry to /etc/fstab and mount the device automatically, but where to mount 
> it? Now, linux has the /media -hierarchy which is really useful for something 
> like this, but FreeBSD doesn't, and it's not really nice for a random piece 
> of software to install things in the root directory of the system so this is 
> not really an option. Another thing that comes to mind is creating something 
> like /usr/local/share/hal/media/ and mounting new devices in directories 
> under that, but that feels really clumsy as well. System administrators are 
> of course free to decide what they think is best for them, but HAL needs a 
> decent default policy, and I'm not sure what that should be. Any ideas?

FreeBSD does have /mnt.  Subdirectories under there might be a good idea.
For example, /mnt/media/* or /mnt/hal/media/*.  I think this would be
easier to find that something buried multiple levels deep.

>
> There is a lot of tiny things to do to make it as smooth as on linux, and I 
> don't really have much hardware to test it with, but the core features are 
> fairly simple and I hope to get something useful done by the summer.
>

Agreed.  I'd love to help.  If you want to make your code available, and
let me know where you're at, I'd be happy to do what ever is needed.

Joe

> Cheers,
> Juho Vuori
>
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