What Is Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)?

The HAL is a big deal. Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is the gatekeeper of the hardware, and a HAL that doesn't work is like a lock on a door that's been broken for weeks. It doesn't matter how secure your system is—if it can't talk to its peripherals, it won't be able to do anything. It's easy to think of HALs as just another device driver, but they're much more than that: they're an abstraction layer between the computer's physical hardware and software. They provide a device driver interface allowing a program to communicate with the hardware so that programs don't need to know if they're running on an Intel processor, ARM processor, or any other kind of processor—they need to know how to talk to their HAL. Then they'll be able to communicate with whatever physical devices are attached to their system. The essential motive of a HAL is to hide unique hardware architectures from the OS by imparting a uniform interface to the machine peripherals. The HAL (hardware abstraction layer) is the thing that makes your computer work. It's like a bouncer for the party in your computer—it lets you get into the party when you want to, but it also keeps out people who aren't invited. The HAL provides an interface between software and hardware so that programs can access hardware peripherals without knowing how they work. That way, if you're writing a game and you want to add some new graphics cards, or if you're writing a program that uses GPS data from satellites, all you have to do is to add the latest hardware to your system, and the HAL will handle all of the other stuff for you. HALs are like the PC's version of a butler. They're the ones that do all the hard work while you sit around and pretend like they're not doing anything at all.