Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.p.

Thomas Wylegala

Lance Warren Russell

Alan Hersh Karp

Rajiv Gupta

Fong Pong

Peter Phaal

Alberto J Munoz

Arindam Banerji

Lu Xu

Stephen L Hoyle

Dejan S Miloiicic

Embodiments of the present invention include a system and method for making it safe to execute downloaded code. The method includes accessing an application, the application making a system call to a library of a computer system for a resource, establishing a requesting thread. The method further includes the library sending a request message to a local security filter; the local security filter validating the requesting thread and returning a digital signature, that uniquely identifies the requesting thread, to the application. The application making a system call to a kernel of the computer system wherein the kernel uses the digital signature from the security filter to validate the requesting thread before allowing access to the requested resource.

System and method for safely executing downloaded code on a computer system

The present invention is a system and method for recovering from memory failures in computer systems. The method of the present invention includes the steps of: identifying a predetermined instruction sequence; monitoring for memory access errors in response to the request; logging a memory access error in an error logging register; polling the register for any logged memory access error during execution of the instruction sequence; and raising exceptions, if the memory access error is logged. Within the system of the present invention, memory access errors are stored in an error logging register, machine check abort handles are masked, and memory controllers are under full control of the software so that memory access errors can be intercepted and responded to without necessitating a system reboot or application restart. The present invention is particularly applicable to O/S code which can not otherwise recover from memory errors except by rebooting.

System and method for recovering from memory failures in computer systems

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Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Thomas Wylegala