HW10 Your assignment is to research additional hardware platforms besides the st
ID: 3907635 • Letter: H
Question
HW10
Your assignment is to research additional hardware platforms besides the standard x86 and x64 computer architectures. You should be able to find at least two. Describe your findings in a couple of good paragraphs. Additionally the chapter mentions the Hardware Abstraction Layer or HAL. This concept is also important to the Windows platform. Research the significance of HAL as it pertains to Linux and Windows. Construct a paragraph or two about how HAL affects Linux and Windows. Conclude with a paragraph contrasting the two Operating Systems utilization of HAL.
Explanation / Answer
Dear Student,
Hardware Platforms:
1. IA-64 (also called Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the Itanium family of 64-bit Intelmicroprocessors.The Itanium architecture is based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, in which the compiler decides which instructions to execute in parallel.
2. VAX is a discontinued instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the mid-1970s. The VAX-11/780, introduced on October 25, 1977, was the first of a range of popular and influential computers implementing that architecture.The VAX instruction set was designed to be powerful and orthogonal. When it was introduced, many programs were written in assembly language, so having a "programmer-friendly" instruction set was important. In time, as more programs were written in higher-level language, the instruction set became less visible.
Significance of HAL:
a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) is a layer of programming that allows a computer operating system to interact with a hardware device at a general or abstract level rather than at a detailed hardware level. It provides an abstraction which acts as an api over the hardware so that the software developers need not have to understand the underlying hardware to write compatible software.
HAL in Linux
HAL provides plug-and-play facilities for UNIX-like desktops with focus on providing a rich and extensible description of device characteristics and features. One example of the functionality provided by HAL is when you plug in a USB storage device. HAL can automatically create a mount point in /media and mount the device.
HAL IN WINDOWS
The HAL is implemented in Windows as a file called hal.dll. If a hardware vendor needs to protect proprietary technology, the company can develop a custom implementation of the HAL. This means that different processor configurations might use different HAL drivers.
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