hal depends on certain kernel features to be present. The ebuild should check whether those are enabled. This would have saved me an hour of debugging :-)
Created attachment 73284 [details, diff] proposed patch The proposed patch uses the infrastructure offered by linux-info eclass to verify that KOBJECT_UEVENT is enabled in the linux config.
With recent mm kernels (and possibly the stable kernel in the future), this option in the kernel configuration seems to have been renamed/moved to CONFIG_CONNECTOR, in the Device Drivers section - the patch above doesn't detect if this option is present.
Fixed in hal-0.5.5.1
Fixed in hal-0.5.5.1-r1