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:
May. 13, 2003
Filed:
Jan. 25, 2000
Benjamen G. Tyner, Austin, TX (US);
Dell USA L.P., Round Rock, TX (US);
Abstract
A system for restricting access to environmental circuits of a computer system. In one embodiment, the environmental circuits are accessible via a serial computer bus that conforms to a system management (SM) specification. I/O accesses to I/O registers assigned to a bus controller of the bus are trapped, wherein an interrupt such as a system management interrupt (SMI) is generated to invoke an interrupt handler that determines whether the I/O access corresponds to a restricted circuit access. If the I/O access corresponds to a restricted circuit access, then the interrupt handler prevents the circuit access from occurring. In one embodiment, I/O accesses to the I/O control register assigned to the bus controller are trapped. The interrupt handler determines whether a circuit access is restricted by reading the contents of the I/O address register and I/O command register assigned to the bus controller.