What are the XT and NT architectures in this context? I couldn't find clear reaults when searching.
"Unlike the NT™, system does not feature a separate Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) between the physical hardware and the rest of the OS. Instead, XT architecture integrates a hardware specific code with the kernel. The user mode is made up of subsystems and it has been designed to run applications written for many different types of operating systems. This allows us to implement any environment subsystem to support applications that are strictly written to the corresponding standard (eg. DOS, or POSIX)."
The issue is that WoA kernels have moved away from heavily embracing hal.dll, instead inlining a lot of functions into the kernel that used to be hal.dll functions for perf reasons. If they kept the original architecture it would have been easy, but they've changed it fairly recently to be less portable.
Isn't this a bad idea?
When you're compiling the kernel you're able to toggle various hardware flags to add to the compilation.
And AMD graphics cards generally work better then NVIDIA (on Linux) because the official drivers have been upstreamed vs Nvidias that haven't