US 2008/0178201 A1Published application

Sharing a network i/o adapter between logical partitions

AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation

InventorsRonald Leroy Billau, Charles Scott Graham, Harvey Gene Kiel, Chetan Mehta, Lee Anton Sendelbach, Jaya Srikrishnan

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Abstract

An I/O adapter sharing mechanism in a logically partitioned computer system allows sharing a network I/O adapter between logical partitions in an efficient manner. A first logical partition owns (or controls) the I/O adapter, and a second logical partition desires to use (or share) the I/O adapter. An I/O adapter device driver that includes a hardware interface is provided in the first logical partition. A virtual device driver is provided in the second logical partition that provides a set of functions that is at least partially defined by querying the I/O adapter device driver in the first logical partition. The I/O adapter sharing mechanism includes a transfer mechanism that allows data to be transferred directly from the virtual device driver in the second logical partition to the I/O adapter without passing through the I/O adapter device driver in the first logical partition.

Claims10

Dependent claims

An apparatus comprising:

(A) at least one processor;
(B) a memory coupled to the at least one processor;
(C) first and second logical partitions defined on the apparatus, the first logical partition controlling a shared network I/O adapter and the second logical partition using the shared network I/O adapter controlled by the first logical partition;
(D) an I/O adapter sharing mechanism residing in the memory and executed by the at least one processor, the I/O adapter sharing mechanism comprising:
(D1) an I/O adapter device driver in the first logical partition, the I/O adapter device driver including a hardware interface to the shared network I/O adapter;
(D2) a virtual device driver in the second logical partition, wherein the virtual device driver provides a set of functions at least partially determined by querying the I/O adapter device driver in the first logical partition for its available functions;
and
(E) a communication mechanism that controls exchange of information between the virtual device driver and the I/O adapter device driver, wherein the communication mechanism comprises a partition manager that communicates between the first and second logical partitions, wherein the communication mechanism further comprises a hosting interface in the first logical partition that communicates between the I/O adapter device driver and the partition manager, wherein the partition manager communicates between the hosting interface in the first logical partition and the virtual device driver in the second logical partition.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.