Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.P.

Rick Aulino

Roland M Hochmuth

James M King

Gregory Mark Hughes

A system and method are provided for supporting remote isochronous devices effectively. In one embodiment, first and second computer hosts include first and second virtual interposer logic, first and second send/receive logic and first and second at least partial device driver stacks therein. The first and second send/receive logics are configured to communicate packets between one another, representing commands and data passing between a user-level application at the first host and a peripheral device at the second host. The first and second virtual interposer logics are configured to interface the first and second send/receive logics to the first and second at least partial device driver-stacks within their respective hosts. To achieve low-latency transactions, the system includes speculative write completion functionality and/or speculative read functionality.

System and method for supporting a remote isochronous device

A method for more efficient buffer control of the configuration of hardware devices. In representative embodiments of the method described in the present patent document, (1) a given configuration is permitted to span exclusive access to the hardware by other processes and (2) different configurations may share the same data buffer. Current configuration of the hardware device is maintained by always placing the current configuration at the beginning of the data buffer. This first entry, comprising the current configuration, is the header of the buffer's data. All subsequent instructions will follow this header, as will any subsequent modifications to the devices' configuration. Since instructions contained in the buffer are to be executed sequentially, the device will always be set to the correct configuration, even when exclusive access between different data sets of the buffer is lost. Because the header is written when a new data set is started and not when the data set is sent down to the device, the header will never be out of date with respect to the data that follows it.

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Ft. Collins, CO, United States of America

Rick Aulino