Implementing coherent accelerator function isolation for virtualization

A system for implementing coherent accelerator function isolation for virtualization in an input/output (IO) adapter comprising:

• a processor;
• a hypervisor managing functions associated with the hardware I/O adapter;
• the I/O adapter comprising a coherent accelerator including an interface services layer providing Partitionable Endpoint (PE) functions and multiple accelerator function units (AFUs);
• each AFU being enabled to operate independently of the other AFUs to perform a computing task that can be implemented within application software on a processor;
• each AFU having access to system memory bound to the application software and each AFU being adapted to make copies of memory within AFU memory-cache in the AFU;
• and each of the AFU memory-cache and processor memory-cache being adapted to be aware of changes to data commonly in either cache as well as data changed in memory of which the respective cache contains a copy for memory coherency domain.