Hal or dbus info

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 15:34 -0400, Chuck Robey wrote:
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> Anyone know, in the case of FreeBSD, how Hal gets (or, I suppose, dbus gets) the
> usb device info?  I am writing an Xorg Xinput driver for a USB graphic tablet,
> and I need to instrument the Hal & dbus interface for it.  I think I will be
> able to get away with (as far as a purely FreeBSD portion) using the uhid
> driver, so I don't need to write any FreeBSD driver.  However, using my tools at
> hand, I get the feeling that hal doesn't get realtime data for usb plugging info.

Hal reads the USB data from /dev/usb using the FreeBSD USB API.  It
learns about hot-plugged USB devices from devd.

> 
> Reason I say that Hal knows usb is because I can use lshal, and list all of the
> current usb devices.  However, if I use dbus-monitor to watch teh dbus state in
> realtime, then I unplug & plug my graphic tablet, dbus monitor is slient about
> it, even if I wait 30 minutes.

You would need to monitor the system dbus channel.

> 
> So, I want to find out what's the source of dbus's info about the state of the
> USB devices.  It's gotta get this info somehow.  Alex Leidinger suggested you
> (and I am running Gnome here, it's possible my Hal is learning all this via Gnome).

D-BUS really has nothing to do with this.  Hald is responsible for
learning about the various hardware components.  It only uses D-BUS to
communicate that data to clients.

> 
> You see, if I'm not able to make myself happy with whatever I find, I may well
> write some kind of a app to run from devfs or devd (which seems to know this
> stuff in realtime) to tip off dbus.  However, if it's Gnome, maybe the
> possibility exists to configure Gnome to know more?

Hald already connects to devd, so it should receive realtime updates.
You might want to look at the hal API, and use the FreeBSD hald addons
as a guide (i.e. take a look at the storage addon).  You can use dbus
filters to pick up hal messages about various devices.

Joe

> 
> So. help me please?
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