Patent · US Active

Methods and apparatus for enabling bus connectivity over a data network

US7694312B2 · kind B2 · utility

9Cited by
5References
50Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateSep 10, 2004
Grant dateApr 6, 2010
Priority date
Expiry dateNov 11, 2027

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F9/544
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A method and system for interconnecting peripherals, processor nodes, and hardware devices to a data network to produce a network bus providing OS functionality for managing hardware devices connected to the network bus involves defining a network bus driver at each of the processor nodes that couples hardware device drivers to a network hardware abstraction layer of the processor node. The network bus can be constructed to account for the hot-swappable nature of the hardware devices using a device monitoring function, and plug and play functionality for adding and, removing device driver instances. The network bus can be used to provide a distributed processing system by defining a shared memory space at each processor node. Distributed memory pages are provided with bus-network-wide unique memory addresses, and a distributed memory manager is added to ensure consistency of the distributed memory pages, and to provide a library of functions for user mode applications.

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