Transaction ordering management

Abstract

Ordering rules, such as those enforced by the peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) protocol for data communications, can be intelligently enforced for independent transactions. A single device might host or be associated with multiple PCIe devices, such as virtual machines, and treating requests from these separate PCIe devices as coming from separate domains enables the ordering rules to be bypassed for certain transactions. Further, since a virtual machine might host multiple applications or be associated with multiple processors that can submit independent requests, the ordering rules can be bypassed at the transaction level in at least some instances. The ability to intelligently bypass ordering rules can help to improve the performance of the overall system, as requests do not need to be unnecessarily delayed and data storage capacity can be more fully utilized.