kernel

The core of an Operating System

An OS kernel is often responsible for handling driver requests, filesystem operations, I/O requests and other system functions.

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hal

Acronym for Hardware Abstraction Layer. The HAL is used by NT-based Operating Systems to handle hardware. This prevents the OS from having direct access to hardware.

The HAL is one of the main reaons that NT-based OS's are more stable than Win9.x.

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