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Appendix E. The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
The Hardware Abstraction Layer is a software interface between the hardware and the rest of the operating system that makes Windows NT portable across platforms. The HAL also acts as the interface between the operating system and the controlling hardware of symmetric multiprocessing processor machines (SMP).
Windows NT Server 4.0 is shipped with a HAL for both the single or multiprocessor platforms available from Intel, MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha. The HAL for each platform is different; even the HAL for variants of the same platform could differ drastically. However, the virtualized processor presented by each HAL to the microkernel is identical.
Depending on the design of the platform, the addition of more processors in an SMP environment could improve the performance of the server substantially.
On a machine with only one processor installed, Windows NT will, by default, try to install the single processor version of a HAL. This is the case even when the machine is
There are two methods to achieve this:
1.Upgrade the HAL
2.Reinstall Windows NT
These are described in the following sections.
Note
If you have a server that is
E.1 Upgrading the HAL for Multiprocessor Use
The method described in this section makes use of the UPTOMP.EXE utility that is available from Microsoft in the Microsoft Windows NT Server Resource Kit (ISBN:
Backup Your System FIRST!
We strongly recommend you backup your server before you proceed with this process.
The affected files are:
•NTOSKRNL.EXE (NTKRNLMP.EXE has to be copied and renamed to
NTOSKRNL.EXE)
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