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:
Feb. 17, 2004
Filed:
Apr. 09, 1999
James G. Hanko, Redwood City, CA (US);
Alan T. Ruberg, Foster City, CA (US);
J. Duane Northcutt, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Gerard A. Wall, San Jose, CA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
A method and apparatus for providing distributed clip-list management. In an embodiment, an application maintains a local clip-list that identifies those portions of a remote frame buffer that are unambiguously associated with the given application, as well as those portions of the remote frame buffer which are disputed between the given application and one or more other applications. Applications may enforce a dispute policy with respect to writing image data to disputed regions of the frame buffer. Applications are able to write to the frame buffer asynchronously, without the use of a frame buffer lock. A clip manager maintains a global clip-list, and responds to messages from the applications by updating the global clip-list and informing those other applications of relevant changes to their own respective local clip-lists. The portions of an application's clip-list that have been previously claimed by other applications and which have not been acknowledged as lost by the other applications are referred to as disputed regions. Each application is kept informed about its current clip-list and any disputed regions within its current clip-list. The clip manager may be implemented as part of the window manager, or as a separate process. A policing process may be implemented at or in line with the frame buffer to ensure that an application does not write to portions of the frame buffer that have been granted to another application. The operations of the policing process are coordinated by the clip manager.