HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer)
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- A layer between the physical hardware of a computer and the software that runs on that computer designed to hide differences in the underlying hardware, thus allowing software to run on a range of different architectures without being modified for each one. Windows uses different HALs depending, among other factors, on whether the underlying system has one CPU (Uniprocessor (UP) HAL) or multiple CPUs (Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) HAL). See also Kernel.
VMware - Cite This Source - This Definition - SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessor), Uniprocessor (UP), Virtual SMP, VSMP (virtual symmetric multiprocessing)