Compaq Computer Corporation, Inc.

Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Robert E Van Cleve

John S Lacombe

Darren John Cepulis

Curtis R Jones

Jeffery L Galloway

Steven Ray Dupree

Michael E McGowen

Paul J Muraski

Rene Richard Gaudet

Paul S Bailey

Stephen D Cochran

Mark I Bain

Peter M Yee

Richard L Purvis

Disclosed is a system and related method for providing operating system drivers during installation of an operating system. In particular, the operating system drivers, that are not available with the operating system itself, are stored in unreserved ROM space. At an appropriate time during installation of the operating system, any needed or necessary drivers are copied from the ROM.

Reserved ROM space for storage of operating system drivers

A computer system in accordance with the present invention provides a method of communicating asynchronous events from a mini-port driver of a computer system to a software component without polling the mini-port driver. The computer system provides a monolithic driver as a dispatch between a mini-port driver and a software component. Until an asynchronous event is detected, an event thread in the monolithic driver to a software component is blocked. When an asynchronous event is detected by the mini-port driver, the mini-port driver calls the monolithic driver with a monolithic driver entry point which queues the event and unblocks the event thread. The monolithic driver provides the asynchronous event to the software component through the unblocked event thread. The event thread is then re-blocked and remains blocked until another asynchronous event is detected. Asynchronous events are thereby communicated from a mini-port driver to a software component without polling the mini-port driver.

Method of communicating asynchronous elements from a mini-port driver

A nonintrusive monitoring system is used to determine the onset and duration times of an electrical power outage-caused down condition of a computer without requiring a pre-power outage polling of a running component of the computer and thereby degrading computer system performance. In response to a supply power outage the monitoring system switches on a battery-powered counter device, representatively a digital counter or a real time clock, and then switches the counter device back off in response to resumption of power supply to the computer. A software portion of the monitoring system then detects the count value of the counter device, and utilizes the count value to compute the onset and duration times of the previous power outage. Using an alternative nonintrusive technique, the monitoring system permits the counter device to run during power supply to the computer, while using the computer system clock to generate periodic time stamps, and disables the counter device during computer supply power outages. Upon resumption of supply power to the computer, the monitoring system compares the time stamp information to the count value to determine the onset and duration times of the previous supply power outage.

Nonintrusive monitoring of a computer system's downtime due to a supply

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The Woodlands, TX, United States of America

Robert E Van Cleve