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. 14, 2001
Filed:
Oct. 30, 1996
Colin McCartney, Kirkland, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
The present invention relates to systems and methods for freeing shared resources that remain allocated to a particular resource allocating process after the resource allocating process has terminated The invention is useful in a computer system where shared hardware is accessed via a shared hardware driver layer The shared hardware driver layer interfaces with either a shared API layer or a nonshared API layer. Processes wishing to access the shared hardware access the hardware through either the shared or nonshared API layer. To release resources and destroy objects in either the shared API layer or the shared hardware driver layer, the present invention uses a helper process that cleans up after termination of the resource allocation process. The helper process first calls, cleanup function in the shared API layer to release resources and destroy objects in the shared API layer and associated hardware driver. The helper process then loads a copy of the nonshared API layer and makes a call to a similar cleanup function to release any remaining resources and destroy any remaining objects. In the alternative, the helper process loads a copy of the nonshared API layer and calls to the similar cleanup function are made by the cleanup function in the shared API layer.