Timing issue (race) with kdm and hal during boot?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

When I enabled readahead-fedora on a freshly installed unstable KDE
desktop with dependency based boot sequencing, a strange thing
happened.  KDM started X, but the keyboard did not work.  I tried two
things based on the idea that kdm depend on something started later,
and suspecting it was hal.  First I tried to make kdm depend on
network-manager.  This got the keyboard working.  network-manager
depend on hal, so the time separation between kdm and hal was
increased.  Next, I dropped that dependency and made hal interactive,
pushing it further ahead in the boot sequence.  This worked too, and
likewise made hal and kdm start further apart.

I do not know what the cause of this problem is, but suspect hal is
not yet operational when its init.d script is started, and X need an
operational hal to find its keyboard settings.  Not sure how we should
solve this.  Race conditions like this will make it impossible to
speed up the boot.  I suspect we will find more of them when the boot
become faster, and thus exposing latent problems currently hidden
because of the slowness of the current boot.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen