[ale] hald
Jim Popovitch
jimpop at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 18 23:16:44 EDT 2005
Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> If I may (having come from the NT side long ago)...
Me too! ;-)
> HAL as in hald isn't quite the same thing as HAL as in NT's HAL. In NT
> (substitute XP, 2000, 2003, whatever), the HAL sits between the OS and
> the hardware and was key to the now long-forgotten capability of running
> NT on Alpha AXP and MIPS processors.
>
> But in Linux, HAL is a mechanism to help straighten out the mess that is
> impermanent devices, along with udev, etc.
What you describe above are two nearly identical things. HAL is HAL, in
Microsoft's or any other vendors' OS. The reason for having a HAL is so
that the OS can be consistent across different hardware, regardless if
those differences are the platform, processor, power mgmt, BIOS, or bus.
-Jim P.
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