Re: CD writing in future Linux (stirring up a hornets' nest)

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Thu Feb 16 2006 - 11:15:11 EST


Kyle Moffett wrote:

On Jan 30, 2006, at 17:52, Bill Davidsen wrote:

What is not easily available in Linux is a nice single place to find out what mass storage (disk/optical/floppy/ZIP/LS120/tape) devices are on the system, and what the system calls them.


Yes it is available, and a whole slew of GUI applications use it. It's called "hal", or Hardware Abstraction Layer, and it has small hooks into udev and a bit of sysfs code so that it has a list of all devices of various types and knows what their associated udev-created device nodes are. This means that I can configure udev to put my CD drive on /dev/burner and correctly written GUI programs will just find it and work.

I was really talking about something stable. HAL is an application, and as such has to be changed avery time some developer has a bad dream and changes the interface, moves a comtrol or report from /proc to /sys, or otherwise requires a new way of interpreting the data. If you will, HAL *in* the kernel where it must work.

--
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
-- Poul Anderson

--

bill davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979

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