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Let's ignore the historical legacy non-PNP ISA config nightmare, because they do not bring anything of value in this discussion. The core system of PC is highly compatible with OSes in pretty much all directions. (Well now even if I don't ignore the non-PNP ISA configurations stuffs, it does not really change the situation: those were not for core system stuffs) Then you have drivers for various bus controllers and peripheral, some of which are crucial for using your PC in practice, but as soon as the necessary driver exists, loaded by the kernel way after the core boot, and highly abstracted on all modern OSes (it only access the HW through functions abstracted by the OS) For non-ancient PC, you even have with ACPI some abstracted functions, provided by the HW, and used at the runtime by the OS. It's to be considered as part of the core plateform, as if it was a pure HW interface, given what we are discussing about. The NT HAL, btw, is a vestigial of early NT years, and is of zero interest for the purpose of PC compatibility today (there is only one HAL that is in use on modern PCs, and IIRC switching the HAL was not even enough when multiple were in use IIRC, other MS binaries still needed to be recompiled -- so the NT HAL is merely an internal detail that bring no consequence in backward or fw compat as far as decoupling of binaries and their update of a partial subset in a system is concerned) Now the situation for ARM SoC for Android is NOT the same. You just don't boot a generic ARM Linux kernel to driver your random ARM SoC of your random phone. Because even what could constitute an equivalent core system as what exists for PC, follows no standard. |