VirtualLarry
No Lifer
I picked up a mobo from a junk dealer once, it was from Tricord systems, it had something like two complete EISA busses, it was a multi-proc 486 board, lots of PALs onboard, and it required a custom HAL for NT because of the multiple expansion busses, it had three 8259-equivalent PICs onboard instead of the standard two to handle all of the IRQs. I never found the processor cards for it, so I never even tried to get it running. It was kind of impressive looking, for a 486-based system. Triple power-supply connections too.
Btw, is source code for HALs available? Surely MS must have provided some to those companies in order for them to write custom ones. I'm vaguely curious as to the relationship and the interfaces between the OS kernel and the HAL. Then again, the OS kernel image is a standard PE executable, AFAIK, so I guess the bootloader loads the HAL and then the kernel. Is the HAL really just considered a boot-time kernel-mode driver like the rest of the drivers?
