International Business Machines Corporation

John C Rathjen, Jr

Leslie W Wyman

Roger E Hough

Mark S Farrell

Robert Edward Galbraith

Kenneth J Oakes

Larry Bert Brenner

Casper A Scalzi

Allan Samuel Meritt

Marten J Halma

Joseph C Elliott

Jeffrey S Lucash

Martin W Sachs

Peter H Gum

Kenneth J Fredericks

Donald W McCauley

David E Stucki

Frank W Brice

Francis E Johnson

Terry L Borden

Barry P Lubart

Suzanne M John

John Fenton Scanlon

Thomas Van Weaver

Paul A Malinowski

George H Bean

Ronald Sasala

Mark E Rakhmilevich

Provides a method for increasing the connectivity of I/O resources to a multiplicity of operating systems (OSs) running in different resource partitions of a computer electronic complex (CEC) to obtain sharing of the I/O resources among the OSs of the CEC, including channels, subchannels (devices), and control units (CUs). The invention provides image identifiers (IIDs) for assigning resources to the different OSs. Each shared I/O resource has a sharing set of control blocks (CBs) in which a respective CB is assigned to (and located by) a respective IID of one of the OSs. Each of the CBs in a sharing set provides a different image of the same I/O resource. The different CB images are independently set to different states by I/O operations for the different OSs, so that the OSs can independently share the same I/O resource.

Method and means for sharing I/O resources by a plurality of operating

A method for serializing access to computer system resources without disabling interrupts in critical code sections or requiring excessive use of spin locks. A queue lock is introduced that allows an interrupt process to enqueue and be processed in turn without a spin lock and to block process code access to a particular resource until all interrupts are processed. Process level code is blocked from accessing a locked resource while requests for accesses from interrupt level code are queued in a deferred work queue which is processed prior to the release of the blocking lock. Establishment of deferred work queue means that processing can continue without disablement of interrupts and without significant overhead consumed by processes holding spin locks.

Interrupt handling serialization for process level programming

The embodiment discloses a method and means for partitioning the resources in a data processing system into a plurality of logical partitions. Host control code may be embodied in programming, microcode, or by special hardware to enable highly efficient operation of a plurality of preferred guest programming systems in the different partitions of the system. The main storage, expanded storage, the channel, and subchannel resources of a system are assigned to the different logical partitions in the system to enable a plurality of preferred guest programming systems to run simultaneously in the different partitions. This invention automatically relocates the absolute addresses of the I/O channel and subchannel resources in the system to their assigned partitions. Also the absolute and virtual addresses of the different guest programming systems are relocated into, as well as page addresses for any expanded storage, their assigned partitions. The guest programming systems generally will be different operating systems. The logical CPU(s) of the guests are dispatched on one or plural real CPUs in the system using the S/370XA SIE (start interpretive execution) instruction. Special operations are provided, including the CPU alerting of other guests in different partitions using I/O interruption signalling. Interception is provided to handle special circumstances.

Logical resource partitioning of a data processing system

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Rhinebeck, NY, United States of America

John C Rathjen, Jr