The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 10, 1999
Filed:
Jul. 01, 1996
Nicolai Kosche, San Francisco, CA (US);
Dave Singleton, Cupertino, CA (US);
Bart Smaalders, San Jose, CA (US);
Andrew Tucker, Los Altos, CA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
In a multiprocessing computer system, a schedulable process entity (such as a UNIX process, a Solaris lightweight process, or a Windows NT thread) sets a memory flag (sc.sub.-- nopreempt) before acquiring a shared resource. This flag tells the operating system that the process entity should not be preempted. When it is time for the process entity to be preempted, but sc.sub.-- nopreempt is set, the operating system sets a flag (sc.sub.-- yield) to tell the process entity that the entity should surrender the CPU when the entity releases the shared resource. However, the entity is not preempted but continues to run. When the entity releases the shared resource, the entity checks the sc.sub.-- yield flag. If the flag is set, the entity makes an OS call to surrender the CPU.