Talk:Hardware abstraction layer

the article states: "BSD, Linux, MS-DOS and the Windows NT based operating systems also have a HAL."

but does MS-DOS really have any HAL?

maybe someone more competent could either fix the article or confirm the existence of the abstraction layer in ms-dos...

regards, Blueshade 12:01, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, MS-DOS was designed so that io.sys serves as an HAL, which is analgios to the CP/M BIOS, which also serves as an HAL. See Non-PC compatible x86 computers. Yuhong 00:38, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

CPM was certainly 'ported' to another architecture (m68k) for atari/ GEM development. I know of no examples of DOS running on other architectures - in fact the use of int 21h and its reliance on CPU registers to pass parameters seems to argue against it. Therefore I would argue that DOS has no HAL (i.e. there is no abstraction present). AFAIK (recall) io.sys is just a wrapper around the standard PC BIOS. I would argue that DOS be removed from this list. Djmwlv 16:05, 7 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Read IBM_PC_compatible#Compatibility_issues. Also, usually processor ports require more than just a change in HAL. 65.110.28.195 05:38, 12 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]