Yeah... there were specific HAL's for some specific chipsets to, things like some Compaq's had their own.. as I think NCR did too.
The UNI vs. MULTI HAL's was primarily a speed optimization for back in the day when SMP was still a rather exotic thing in the personal workstation space... it didn't waste time acquiring some spin locks, etc... for thread synchronization that wasn't necessary on a single CPU. After a while CPU's became fast wnough, and SMP common enough, it wasn't worth the trouble... now the default HAL is SMP capable. Indeed Win7 won't care if he switches the CPU's he mentioned as long as it's all an ACPI system. -sc -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ben Scott Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2014 11:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] move hdd with windows 7 on it On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 11:08 PM, John C Owen <[email protected]> wrote: > I remember XP having a different version for more than one CPU Yes, there was a multiprocessor HAL and a uniprocessor HAL. There were also variants of each for ACPI vs non-ACPI, as well as some weirder things. I'm not sure how many of those may have survived into Windows 7, but I am pretty sure a dual core Pentium and an i5 will both use the ACPI mutliprocessor HAL. -- Ben
