HAL (Software)

HAL is a software that enables applications to retrieve information about available hardware and to communicate with her. With HAL applications can respond to connection and removal of hardware ( plug and play). HAL works as a daemon and uses D-Bus to communicate information to application software. HAL has its own database, which contains detailed descriptions of hardware components. Thus, application software, for example, be able to address a digital camera as such, even if they are to recognize Serial Bus as data storage only at Universal.

The first version of this software was released in September 2003.

Your name "HAL" actually shortens the English hardware abstraction layer, German hardware abstraction layer, and from such also resembles a. In May 2008, the author of the specifications known, however, that it is not an abstraction layer.

HAL is now removed from many Linux distributions as it "has become a large, monolithic unwartbares mess ". Based on the experience of the HAL project was originally planned as a replacement DeviceKit, now the functionality is directly provided by udev.