Selective routing of asynchronous event notifications

摘要

A processor enables simultaneous use of a single facility by an application, and privileged operators, such as an operating system or a hypervisor. The processor includes a routing register, which may be initialized by an operating system (or hypervisor), to indicate which subsets of a facility are used by which entity. The processor is configured to determine the entity assigned to a given subset of the facility in response to an event notification, and selectively route the event notification to the appropriate entity.

主权项

1. A method, comprising:
initializing, by an operating system, a first register having a plurality of subfields corresponding to a hardware facility, wherein each of the subfields corresponds to a subset of the hardware facility, wherein the first register assigns subsets of the hardware facility to an appropriate entity, and wherein the initializing the first register comprises:
modifying a first subfield corresponding to a first subset of the hardware facility to indicate the first subset of the hardware facility is assigned to the operating system; andmodifying a second subfield corresponding to a second subset of the hardware facility to indicate the second subset of the hardware facility is assigned to an application; responsive to detecting a hardware event associated with a given subset of the hardware facility, determining the entity assigned to a given subset of the hardware facility based on the first register; and selectively routing the event notification to the determined entity assigned to the given subset of the hardware facility.