International Business Machines Corporation

David Alan Bailey

Gregory Michael Nordstrom

Steven Mark Thurber

Trung Ngoc Nguyen

Kanisha Patel

Naresh Nayar

William Joseph Armstrong

Timothy Roy Block

Gary Dean Anderson

Diane Lacey Knipfer

Peter Rudolf Keller

A partition manager includes an I/O reconfiguration mechanism and a logical partition suspend/resume mechanism that work together to perform autonomic I/O reconfiguration in a logically partitioned computer system. When I/O reconfiguration is required, the affected logical partitions are suspended, the I/O is reconfigured, and the affected logical partitions are resumed. Because the logical partitions are suspended during I/O reconfiguration, any ghost packet that may occur when the I/O is reconfigured is ignored.

Apparatus and method for autonomically suspending and resuming logical partitions when I/O reconfiguration is required

In a clustered computer system with multiple power domains, a bus number manager within each power domain manages multiple nodes independently of other power domains. A node within a specified power domain includes a non-volatile memory that includes bus numbering information for its own buses as well as bus numbering information for two of its logically-interconnected neighbors. This creates a distributed database of the interconnection topology for each power domain. Because a node contains bus numbering information about its logical neighbor node(s), the bus numbers for the buses in the nodes are made persistent across numerous different system reconfigurations. The clustered computer system also includes a bus number manager that reads the non-volatile memories in the nodes during initial program load (i.e., boot) that reconstructs the interconnection topology from the information read from the non-volatile memories, and that assigns bus numbers to the buses according to the derived interconnection topology.

Detecting system reconfiguration and maintaining persistent I/O configuration data in a clustered computer system

An apparatus, program product and method propagate errors detected in an IO fabric element from an IO fabric that is used to couple a plurality of endpoint IO resources to processing elements in a computer. In particular, such errors are propagated to the endpoint IO resources affected by the IO fabric element in connection with recovering from the errors in the IO fabric element. By doing so, a device driver or other program code used to access each affected IO resources may be permitted to asynchronously recover from the propagated error in its associated IO resource, and often without requiring the recovery from the error in the IO fabric element to wait for recovery to be completed for each of the affected IO resources. In addition, an IO fabric may be dynamically configured to support both recoverable and non-recoverable endpoint IO resources. In particular, IO fabric elements within an IO fabric may be dynamically configured to enable machine check signaling in such IO fabric elements in response to detection that an endpoint IO resource is non-recoverable in nature. The IO fabric elements that are dynamically configured as such are disposed within a hardware path that is defined between the non-recoverable resource and a processor that accesses the non-recoverable resource.

Autonomic recovery from hardware errors in an input/output fabric

The present invention provides a method and computer program product for reading an encoded cable speed/length value contained within an interconnection cable to set the interconnection speed of two or more components connected by the interconnection cable within a computing environment. This method detects changes to the cable connections within the I/O fabric of the computing environment, and autonomically reconfigures the connected components to enable the interconnected devices to communicate at the maximum effective bandwidth, based on the length of the interconnection cables utilized.

Autonomic configuration of port speeds of components connected to an interconnection cable

Growing community of inventors

Kasson, MN, United States of America

David Alan Bailey