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AssigneeCompaq Computer Corporation
InventorsLawrence W. Lomelino, Thomas W. Grieff, Michael L. Sabotta
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The present invention relates to a secondary channel for a point-to-point burst style bus associated with a computer system. The point-to-point bus may originate as a standardized bus from a fibre channel controller. The point-to-point bus connects to another circuit which may be a bridge circuit, a minicomputer or a peripheral device. A secondary channel is also connected to the point-to-point bus and is adapted to share the bus by receiving information having predetermined addresses. The information recieved by the secondary channel can be stored in a memory that is shared with a processor. Command/control information can be extracted from the point-to-point bus before data is transferred through the bridge circuit in order to allow the data to be acted on more quickly by processing/storage devices since the control data was already made available to the storage devices via the secondary channel.
A computer system having a fibre channel system interface apparatus for communicating information from a fibre channel system interface bus, such that control command information is separated from data stream information and available for processing in advance of data stream information, said fibre channel system interface comprising:
A computer system having a fibre channel interface system, said fiber channel interface system comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.