Windows NT
Fig.2.13 : structure of Windows NT
Windows NT is a multitasking, multi-threaded (single-user) and SMP. Four layers:
Hardware application layer (HAL): Abstracts the underlying hardware by mapping between generic hardware commands to those unique to a specific platform: Intel’s Pentium, PowerPC, DEC’s alpha. Provides the support for symmetric multiprocessing.
Microkernel: Scheduling, context-switching, exception and interrupt handling, and multi-processor synchronization.