Abstract: A fault recovering method for substituting an instruction processor (IP) for a system supporting processor to execute processing thereof when the system supporting processor fails. An apparatus implementing this processing method comprises a plurality of processors, at least one of which is operated as a system supporting processor (SSP) and the rest of which are operated as instruction processors. When the SSP fails, an interrupt is generated to an OS running on at least one IP. The OS recognizes that a fault occurred in the IP, abnormally terminates an application program which has been running on the IP when the interrupt was generated, or stops instruction processing as the IP falling into a hardware failure state, or input a command for disconnecting an alternate instruction processor for the system supporting processor, so that the IP takes over functions of the SSP.

Abstract: In a fault recovery method for a multi-processor system including a main storage and a plurality of virtual machines which are assigned to a plurality of processors under control of a host operating system and a plurality of guest operating systems and which operate on the processors associated therewith, a fault occurring in one of the processors is detected to recover functions of the system.