HAL on FreeBSD

[Juho Vuori]

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.

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?

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.

Cheers,
Juho Vuori