Topic summary
Hardware abstraction layer
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Hardware abstraction.
Hardware abstraction layer
A hardware abstraction layer (HAL) is an abstraction layer, implemented in software, between the physical hardware of a computer and the software that runs on that computer. Its function is to hide differences in hardware from most of the operating systemkernel, so that most of the kernel-mode code does not need to be changed to run on systems with different hardware. On Microsoft Windows, HAL can basically be considered to be the driver for the motherboard and allows instructions from higher level computer languages to communicate with lower level components, but prevents direct access to the hardware.