Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Saul G Wold

Ioi Kim Lam

Gary L Owens

Bernd Jw Mathiske

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates performing independent asynchronous I/O operations within a platform-independent virtual machine. Upon encountering an I/O operation, a language thread within the system marshals parameters for the I/O operation into a parameter space located outside of an object heap of the platform-independent virtual machine. Next, the language thread causes an associated operating system thread (OS-thread) to perform the I/O operation, wherein the OS-thread accesses the parameters from the parameter space. In this way, the OS-thread does not access the parameters in the object heap directly while performing the I/O operation.

Method and apparatus for managing independent asynchronous I/O operations within a virtual machine

An embodiment of the present invention provides an efficient and robust way to incorporate new installation scripts into an existing operating system in order to install and reboot a system using a new platform specific kernel and new device specific drivers. The embodiment determines the platform architecture of the system and stores it in an address space of an existing operating system kernel. The embodiment also pre-processes a file with dynamic entries in order to generate device independent package names. If the platform architecture type stored in each package matches the platform architecture type stored in the kernel address space then the file system is used to install the files from the package onto the system. The existing operating system then reboots the system using the installed platform specific kernel.

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Eugene, OR, United States of America

Saul G Wold