Right now, installing hal will result in hald-addon-storage polling
removable devices from boot - even if nothing's paying attention. This
is a surprisingly large power consumption hit on modern systems. udisks
starts the polling on-demand, which is preferable, but some legacy
applications still require hal.
I've just split hald-addon-storage out into its own package in rawhide.
If you need the hald-addon-storage functionality (ie, you rely on hal
for media change events) then please add an explicit depends on
hal-storage-addon.
Comments
Re: hal-storage-addon is now a separate package
By Jon Masters at 03/17/2010 - 06:08Thanks! I reported elsewhere to some virt. folks that it is also a CPU
hog (in terms of waking up guests every two seconds to poll a virtual CD
device that may almost never have "media"). They are going to look at
fixing the qemu emulation so that virtualized drives can report media
status without being polled. But this now yields two interim solutions,
including either explicitly telling hal not to poll (I typically do this
on all new installs under virt) or removing this package in the future.
Jon.
Re: hal-storage-addon is now a separate package
By Matthew Garrett at 03/17/2010 - 10:08You'll still have issues with udisks polling if the session requests it,
so the qemu fix is still a good one. As long as they indicate that they
support async notification, everything should just work.
Re: hal-storage-addon is now a separate package
By Jon Masters at 03/17/2010 - 20:53Right, indeed and indeed. So it's on their radar.
Jon.