Description:
DeviceKit is a simple system service that a) can enumerate devices; b) emits signals when devices are added removed; c) provides a way to merge device information / quirks onto devices. It is designed to partially replace hal and overcome some of the design limitiations of hal. DeviceKit functionality is provided in the form of dbus services on the system bus.

Apart from DeviceKit itself, there is DeviceKit-disks, which is a system service to keep track of block devices. The functionality offered by DeviceKit-disks is a superset of what hal provides for block devices.

There is also DeviceKit-power, which takes over the power-management-related parts of hal and the more complex functionality of gnome-power-manager. As a consequence, gnome-power-manager itself becomes much simpler.

The new udev-extra module will provide udev rules that are needed to make the DeviceKit architecture work. Functionality that was provided via .fdi files in hal will eventually be moved to udev rules, and setting acls on devices will also be done here at some point.

DeviceKit-disks comes with a graphical frontend called palimpsest (the package name is gnome-disk-utility). Furthermore, there's a nautilus extension to format disks (nautilus-gdu), accessible from context menu.

Additional info:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DeviceKit
http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/