There seem to be some mistaken ideas in Hush's post.
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Originally Posted by Hush
I believe that the HAL is created on installation. I’m am assuming this because if you install windows and your BOIS does not support ACPI and then you upgrade your BOIS to a one that does support ACPI then you are required to do a new instillation due to the fact that the HAL will no longer function.
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Your statement assumes that a HAL is an entity that can be created and destroyed. In reality, the HAL is but a portion of the kernel that is shipped on a particular architecture release. There's no reason to give it a fancy name...it's good practice in any case to separate whatever stuff is architecture/os/etc dependant from what is not. It makes perfect sense to do, really. If Microsoft has to port the NT kernel to platform X, they write a HAL that works with it, get a compiler that supports X, and they're done. In a severely simplified sense. The Linux kernel has been ported to a much larger range of architectures, possibly due to the availability of the source. You don't see the mention of "HAL" anywhere, but the principle is the same.
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Originally Posted by OP
Different CPUs have different architectures, right? Like AMD and Intel are similar, but different in the sense of paging, segmentation and so on.
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The OP also seemse to have some misconceptions.
AMD and Intel are companies, not architectures. x86 is an architecture, first around way back when with the 8086, 386 and friends. It just so happens that since then, x86 has become wildly popular...the original IBM PC, for one, followed by the army of clones by various companies. When Microsoft went on to release Windows, it would only make sense to write it for the same architecture as DOS and sell to the same market. The rest is history. x86 processors have dominated the desktop market even until now, with two main manufacturers: Intel, the original creator of the architecture, and AMD, a fairly succesful cloner. But both AMD and Intel's x86 chips adhere to the x86 spec...same registers, behavior, etc. You don't have to have separate software releases for the same architecture, which is why you don't see AMD and Intel versions of software at the store. At least, that's how I interpreted your question. Correct me if I misunderstood.