HAL (software)

HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer or rather Hardware Annotation Library) is a software subsystem for UNIX-like operating systems providing hardware abstraction. HAL is now deprecated on most Linux distributions and on FreeBSD. Functionality is being merged into udev on Linux as of 2008–2010 and devd on FreeBSD. Previously, HAL was built on top of udev. Some other OS-es which don't have an alternative like udev or devd still use HAL. HAL is unrelated to the concept of Windows NT kernel HALs, which handle some platform-specific core functionality within the kernel, such as interrupt routing.

HAL (software)

HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer or rather Hardware Annotation Library) is a software subsystem for UNIX-like operating systems providing hardware abstraction. HAL is now deprecated on most Linux distributions and on FreeBSD. Functionality is being merged into udev on Linux as of 2008–2010 and devd on FreeBSD. Previously, HAL was built on top of udev. Some other OS-es which don't have an alternative like udev or devd still use HAL. HAL is unrelated to the concept of Windows NT kernel HALs, which handle some platform-specific core functionality within the kernel, such as interrupt routing.