Patent · US Expired

Virtualization system for computers with a region-based memory architecture

US7089377B1 · kind B1 · utility

109Cited by
1References
20Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventor

Key dates

Filing dateSep 6, 2002
Grant dateAug 8, 2006
Priority date
Expiry dateMar 6, 2024

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F12/1036
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

In a computer system with a non-segmented, region-based memory architecture, such as Intel IA-64 systems, two or more sub-systems share a resource, such as a virtual-to-physical address mapping and need to have overlapping regions of the virtual address space for accessing different physical addresses. Virtual addresses include a portion that is used to identify which region the issuing sub-system wants to access. For example, the region-identifying portion of virtual addresses may select a region register whose contents point to a virtual-to-physical address mapping for the corresponding region. To protect a second sub-system S2 from a first S1, whenever the S1 issues an address in a region occupied by S2, the region for the S2 is changed. This allows S1 to issue its addresses without change. In a preferred embodiment of the invention, S2 is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and S1 is a virtual machine running on the VMM.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.