What is hald service used for?

Solution Verified - Updated 7 Aug 2024

Environment

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Issue

What is the hald service used for?

Resolution

hald required mesagebus service to run. For further information on managing this service, please refer What is an initscript service and how do I start and stop it?
hald is a service provided by the hal (hardware abstraction layer) package, that allows you to set up hardware (such as a keymap for multimedia enabled keyboard) and allows user-space applications to access and manage hardware such as Xorg, gnome power manager, and likewise.
The hald-addon-storage is spawned by hald, and is used for monitoring removable drives.
On desktops such as GNOME or KDE use this service to allow users and applications to manage available hardware resources by applications such as X, rhythmbox, .... A typical example would be to allow a user to auto-mount removable media when an MP3 player is connected, power management, and more.
```
  # X will disable input ( mouse/keyboard/..), when hal is disabled, and warn about the same in X log.
  $ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log
  ...
  The server relies on HAL to provide list of input devices.
  If no devices become available, reconfire HAL or disable AutoAddDevices        
```
On RHEL5 server, services such as rhn_register, and libvirt (used for virtualisation ) use HAL hardware management.

Comments

For further information, refer This content is not included.This content is not included.http://www.redhat.com/magazine/003jan05/features/hal/ .
Hal is deprecated in Content from www.freedesktop.org is not included.upstream
This is Content from fedoraproject.org is not included.being removed on newer fedora releases and hence in RHEL6
Hal can be disabled if no GUI is being used on RHEL6

Product(s)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Components

Tags

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