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  84 NAME="HAL-INTRODUCTION">Chapter 6. Introduction</H1
  85 ><P
  86 >This is an initial specification of the <SPAN
  87 CLASS="emphasis"
  88 ><I
  89 CLASS="EMPHASIS"
  90 >eCos</I
  91 ></SPAN
  92 > Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). The HAL abstracts
  93 the underlying hardware of a processor architecture and/or the
  94 platform to a level sufficient for the eCos kernel to be ported onto
  95 that platform.</P
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  98 ><BLOCKQUOTE
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 100 ><P
 101 ><B
 102 >Caveat: </B
 103 >This document is an informal description of the HAL capabilities and
 104 is not intended to be full documentation, although it may be used as a
 105 source for such. It also describes the HAL as it is currently
 106 implemented for the architectures targeted in this release. It most
 107 closely describes the HALs for the MIPS, I386 and PowerPC HALs. Other
 108 architectures are similar but may not be organized precisely as
 109 described here.</P
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