Imagination Technologies Limited

Mihai Dragan

Mario Sopena Novales

Philip Morris

A computer system has a plurality of operating systems, each operating system including a GPU driver; a graphics processing unit (GPU) including GPU firmware for controlling the execution of tasks at the graphics processing unit and, for each operating system: a firmware state register modifiable by the GPU firmware and indicating whether the GPU firmware is online; and an OS state register modifiable by the GPU driver of the respective operating system and indicating whether the GPU driver is online; and a memory management unit configured to mediate access to the registers of the GPU such that each operating system can access its respective registers but not those of other operating systems; wherein: one of the GPU drivers at the plurality of operating systems is a host GPU driver configured to initialise the GPU and bring the GPU firmware online; each GPU driver is configured to submit tasks for processing at the GPU only if its respective firmware state register indicates that the GPU firmware is online; and the GPU is configured to process tasks for an operating system if the respective OS state register of that operating system indicates that the GPU driver is online.

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Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

Mihai Dragan