HAL (software)

HAL (software)

HAL is a software project providing a hardware abstraction layer for Unix-like computer systems.

HAL is now deprecated on GNU/Linux systems, with functionality being merged into udev as of 2008–2010. Previously, HAL was built on top of udev, which was lower level.

It aimed to allow desktop applications to discover and use the hardware of the host system through a simple, portable and abstract API, regardless of the type of the underlying hardware.

HAL was originally envisioned by Havoc Pennington and is now a freedesktop.org project, being a key part of the software stack of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. It is free software, dual-licensed under both the GNU General Public License and the Academic Free License.

HAL is unrelated to the earlier concept of Windows NT kernel HALs (also found in current Windows releases), which handle some platform-specific core functionality within the kernel, such as interrupt routing.