Object Technology Licensing Corporation

Erath Unikat Sudhakaran

Glenn P Andert

System resources are automatically assigned by a single resource conflict resolver to all functions on expansion buses in a computer system. Such system resources include, but are not limited to, memory ranges, input-output (I/O) register ranges, interrupt request lines and direct memory access (DMA) channels. Generally, the assignment is exclusive, however, in some cases, the assignment may be shared so that one or more resources will be shared between different functions. In order to prevent contention between two functions for the same resource, classes are provided which classes can be instantiated to construct resource lock objects. The resource lock objects provide an access control mechanism to synchronize access to the resources among the devices that use and, possibly, share the resources. The lock object contains methods which retrieve the resource assignments for an I/O function and acquire a lock on the resources. The lock object can be used by device drivers to first retrieve the resource assignments from the hardware configuration database and then acquire access to the resources assigned to an I/O function. The acquired access can be either exclusive or shared.

Object-oriented resource lock and entry register

A single, global resource manager assigns system resources to all hardware devices in the computer system, including hardware devices that are both 'plug and play' software programmable, hardware devices that are manually-configurable and the system motherboard. The resource manager includes a conflict resolver module which resolves conflicts which arise in the computer system over the allocation of system resources. Such system resources include, but are not limited to, memory ranges, input-output (I/O) register ranges, interrupt request lines and direct memory access (DMA) channels. Resource requirements for each device are obtained by recognizer objects which are customized versions of standardized objects that are part of the resource resolver framework and all resource requirements are encapsulated in resource usage objects which have a standard interface that works with the global resource resolver. The resource usage objects also encapsulate resource assignments generated by the global conflict resolver and thus contain complete information regarding resources for each device. The resource usage objects are stored in a hardware configuration database by recorder objects which are specialized for each device. The stored resource usage objects can be used both during system booting and during manual system reconfiguration.

Object-oriented global resource conflict resolver formatting resource

A conflict object is generated during a conflict resolution process when resource conflicts cannot be resolved. The conflict object contains detailed information concerning the source of the conflict. If the conflict results from a manually-configured board and the manually-configured board can be reconfigured to remove the conflict, the conflict object provides information concerning the necessary change. When the conflict object is generated, an exception is also thrown, allowing the computer system to perform additional processing such as notifying the user and displaying the contents of the conflict object.

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Erath Unikat Sudhakaran