sysutils/hal - The NetBSD Packages Collection

What is the point of HAL?

To merge information from various sources such that desktop applications can
locate and use hardware devices. The point is that the exact set of
information to merge varies by device and bus type. In order to do this, we
need to define a format for the information, hence the HAL specification.

We may read some stuff from the hardware itself, then add some info provided
by the kernel, then add some metadata from some systemwide files, then add
some data that has been obtained by the desktop and stored per-user, then
look at some blacklist, and finally we have a complete picture of everything
known about that particular device.

An extra value is that we can do this in an operating system independent way.
Stuff like this is important to the major desktop environments.