December 2006
Beginner to intermediate
560 pages
16h 2m
English
Content preview from The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of WindowsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter Nine. Reminiscences on Hardware
ONE OF THE roles of an operating system is to insulate applications from hardware to some degree or other. This is hard enough with properly functioning hardware, but bad hardware makes the problem even more difficult. Here are some hardware-related stories, some dealing with bad hardware, and others just with the complexity of dealing with hardware in the first place, even the type that works just fine.
Hardware backward compatibility
BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY APPLIES not only to software. It also applies to hardware. And when hardware goes bad, the software usually takes the blame.
The HLT instruction tells the CPU to stop (“halt”) executing instructions until the next hardware interrupt. This is a big win ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.