Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory – Storage accessing and control – Shared memory area
Reexamination Certificate
2001-06-14
2004-09-14
Gossage, Glenn (Department: 2187)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory
Storage accessing and control
Shared memory area
Reexamination Certificate
active
06792514
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to computer software and, more particularly, to stressing and testing logical partitioning features of a data processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
A logical partitioning option (LPAR) within a data processing system (platform) allows multiple copies of a single operating system (OS) or multiple heterogeneous operating systems to be simultaneously run on a single data processing system platform. A partition, within which an operating system image runs, is assigned a non-overlapping sub-set of the platform's resources. These platform allocable resources include one or more architecturally distinct processors with their interrupt management area, regions of system memory, and input/output (I/O) adapter bus slots. The partition's resources are represented by its own LPAR firmware device tree to the OS image.
Each distinct OS or image of an OS running within the platform is protected from each other such that software errors on one logical partition can not affect the correct operation of any of the other partitions. This is provided by allocating a disjoint set of platform resources to be directly managed by each OS image and by providing mechanisms for ensuring that the various images can not control any resources that have not been allocated to it. Furthermore, software errors in the control of an OS's allocated resources are prevented from affecting the resources of any other image. Thus, each image of the OS (or each different OS) directly controls a distinct set of allocable resources within the platform.
Management of the partitioning may be different for different types of hardware. Some aspects of the partitioning are done in the hardware and some aspects are performed in the firmware which runs at a level more privileged than the privilege of the supervisory mode. One challenge in management of the partitions is in testing to make sure that the isolation and insulation of logical partitions is strictly enforced. The consequence of failure of this partition isolation can be very expensive to users. Furthermore, debugging this failure in the customer environment with production level operating systems and with all the customer applications can be extremely tedious and expensive if not impossible. Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method, system, and apparatus for testing and stressing the hardware and firmware against malicious applications to ensure that the isolation and insulation of the partitions are secure before an LPAR system fails.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for testing enforcement of logical partitioning in a data processing system. In one embodiment, a call to an interface routine of a logical partitioning enforcement software unit is generated and sent to the logical partitioning enforcement software unit. A reply is received from the logical partitioning enforcement software unit and compared with an anticipated reply. Responsive to a discrepancy between the reply and the anticipated reply, a user is notified of a problem, thus allowing the user to take appropriate actions to correct the problem.
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Kapoor Shakti
Sankarannair Jayakumar N.
Gossage Glenn
McBurney Mark E.
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