Patents by Inventor Timothy J. Schimke

Timothy J. Schimke has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 9720775
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing concurrent adapter firmware update of a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) adapter in a virtualized system. An adapter driver is used to update adapter firmware concurrent with normal I/O operations. When configuration is stored in a scratchpad buffer, the adapter driver detects virtual functions (VFs) configured and operating. An enhanced error handling (EEH) process is initiated, freezing the VFs, and an updated adapter firmware image is loaded to the adapter. The adapter driver completes the EEH recovery, the adapter is restarted using the new updated adapter firmware. The VFs device drivers unfreeze the VFs, and complete the EEH recovery.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 12, 2013
    Date of Patent: August 1, 2017
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Jesse P. Arroyo, James A. Donnelly, Charles S. Graham, John R. Oberly, III, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9720863
    Abstract: Migrating memory MMIO from a source I/O adapter of a source computing system to a destination I/O adapter of a destination computing system, includes: collecting, by a source hypervisor of the source computing system, MMIO mapping information, where the source hypervisor supports a logical partition on the source computing system and the logical partition is configured for MMIO operations with the source I/O adapter through an MMU; placing, by a destination hypervisor of the destination computing system, the destination I/O adapter in an error state; migrating the logical partition from the source computing system to the destination computing system; configuring, by the destination hypervisor of the destination computing system, the destination computing system for MMIO with the LPAR utilizing the MMIO mapping information collected by the source hypervisor; and restarting the logical partition on the destination computing system, including recovering, by the logical partition, from the error state.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 21, 2016
    Date of Patent: August 1, 2017
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Jesse P. Arroyo, Charles S. Graham, Prathima Kommineni, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9720862
    Abstract: Migrating interrupts from a source I/O adapter of a computing system to a destination I/O adapter of the computing system, includes: collecting, by a hypervisor of the computing system, interrupt mapping information, where the hypervisor supports operation of a logical partition executing and the logical partition is configured to receive interrupts from the source I/O adapter; configuring, by the hypervisor, the destination I/O adapter with the interrupt mapping information collected by the hypervisor; placing, by the hypervisor, the destination I/O adapter and the source I/O in an error state; deconfiguring the source I/O adapter from the logical partition; and enabling the logical partition and destination I/O adapter to recover from the error state.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 21, 2016
    Date of Patent: August 1, 2017
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Jesse P. Arroyo, Charles S. Graham, Prathima Kommineni, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9715469
    Abstract: Migrating interrupts from a source I/O adapter of a source computing system to a destination I/O adapter of a destination computing system, includes: collecting, by a source hypervisor of the source computing system, interrupt mapping information, were the source hypervisor supports operation of a logical partition executing on the source computing system and the logical partition is configured to receive interrupts from the source I/O adapter; configuring, by the destination hypervisor of the destination computing system, the destination computing system with the interrupt mapping information collected by the source hypervisor; placing, by a destination hypervisor of the destination computing system, the destination I/O adapter in an error state; migrating the logical partition from the source computing system to the destination computing system; and restarting the logical partition on the destination computing system, including recovering, by the logical partition, from the error state.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 21, 2016
    Date of Patent: July 25, 2017
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Jesse P. Arroyo, Charles S. Graham, Prathima Kommineni, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Publication number: 20170206105
    Abstract: The present disclosure relates to sharing an I/O device across multiple virtual machines. According to one embodiment, a computing system configures shared ownership of the I/O device between a first partition and one or more of the plurality of virtual machines. The computing system transfers partial ownership of the I/O device from the first partition to the one or more virtual machines and generates device configuration information for the I/O device. The virtual machines can use the generated device configuration information to access and configure the I/O device. Once the I/O device is configured for shared ownership, the computing system boots the one or more virtual machines.
    Type: Application
    Filed: January 20, 2016
    Publication date: July 20, 2017
    Inventors: Juan J. ALVAREZ, Jesse P. ARROYO, Paul G. CRUMLEY, Charles S. GRAHAM, Joefon JANN, Timothy J. SCHIMKE, Ching-Farn E. WU
  • Publication number: 20170206091
    Abstract: The present disclosure relates to sharing an I/O device across multiple virtual machines. According to one embodiment, a computing system establishes a communication channel between a first partition and a second partition. The first partition generally owns an I/O device and the second partition hosts a device driver for the I/O device. The computing system configures shared ownership of the I/O device between the first partition and one or more virtual machines and transfers partial ownership of the I/O device to the second partition. Device configuration information is generated for the I/O device, which is used by the one or more virtual machines and the second partition to access and configure the I/O device. Subsequently, the computing system boots the one or more virtual machines.
    Type: Application
    Filed: January 20, 2016
    Publication date: July 20, 2017
    Inventors: Juan J. ALVAREZ, Jesse P. ARROYO, Paul G. CRUMLEY, Charles S. GRAHAM, Joefon JANN, Timothy J. SCHIMKE, Ching-Farn E. WU
  • Publication number: 20170199768
    Abstract: A method to manage peripheral component interconnect (PCI) memory includes accessing a page table that includes mapped data representing base address register (BAR) space and addresses of PCI devices. The method also includes determining whether a requested address of a PCI device has a corresponding entry in the page table. The method further includes invoking a hypervisor to perform a memory operation to obtain address information of the PCI device upon determining that the requested address does not have the corresponding entry in the page table.
    Type: Application
    Filed: January 11, 2016
    Publication date: July 13, 2017
    Inventors: Jesse P. Arroyo, Charles S. Graham, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9628374
    Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for providing Ethernet link aggregation for logically independent entities that share a plurality of physical ports. A client operating system (OS) executing in a host computing system receives a selection of two or more logical Ethernet ports. Each logical Ethernet port is assigned to one of a plurality of physical Ethernet ports of a network adapter. The client OS generates a first link aggregate from the logical Ethernet ports. System firmware assigns an identifier to the first link aggregate that associates an aggregate configuration with the first link aggregate. The firmware registers the aggregate configuration with a network device that maintains configurations of at least a second link aggregate.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 19, 2016
    Date of Patent: April 18, 2017
    Assignee: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
    Inventors: Colin R. Devilbiss, Charles S. Graham, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9537798
    Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for providing Ethernet link aggregation over physical ports shared by logically independent entities. An aggregation manager receives a frame at a first logical port that receives frames targeted to at least a second logical port. A client operating system receives the frame at the second logical port. The aggregation manager determines whether the second logical port received the frame. Upon determining that the second logical port did not receive the frame, the aggregation manager forwards the frame to the client OS via a sideband interface associated with the client OS.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 19, 2016
    Date of Patent: January 3, 2017
    Assignee: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
    Inventors: Colin R. Devilbiss, Charles S. Graham, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9535740
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing dynamic adjustment of resources allocated to Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) Remote Direct Memory Access (RMDA) virtual functions (VFs) in Cloud Software Defined Server environments. A hardware management console (HMC), and a hypervisor are used to implement resource allocation to the SRIOV RDMA VFs based on resource usage. The hypervisor checks resource usage for the resource allocations of the SRIOV RDMA VF relative to lower and upper threshold values. Responsive to identifying the resource usage below the lower threshold or above the upper threshold, the hypervisor sends an event to the HMC, and the HMC starts a resource redistribution process.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 26, 2015
    Date of Patent: January 3, 2017
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Charles S. Graham, Prathima Kommineni, Timothy J. Schimke, Narsimha R. Challa
  • Patent number: 9507619
    Abstract: Virtualizing a host USB adapter in a virtualized environment maintained by a hypervisor, the hypervisor administering one or more logical partitions, where virtualizing includes receiving, by the hypervisor from a logical partition via a logical USB adapter, a USB Input/Output (‘I/O’) request, the logical USB adapter associated with a USB device coupled to the host USB adapter; placing, by the hypervisor, a work queue element (‘WQE’) in a queue of a queue pair associated with the logical USB adapter; and administering, by an interface device in dependence upon the WQE, USB data communications among the logical partition and the USB device including retrieving, with direct memory access (‘DMA’), USB data originating at the USB device from the host USB adapter into a dedicated memory region for the logical USB adapter.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 12, 2010
    Date of Patent: November 29, 2016
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Ellen M. Bauman, Harvey G. Kiel, Timothy J. Schimke, Lee A. Sendelbach
  • Patent number: 9501308
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing coherent accelerator function isolation for virtualization in an input/output (IO) adapter in a computer system. A coherent accelerator provides accelerator function units (AFUs), each AFU is adapted to operate independently of the other AFUs to perform a computing task that can be implemented within application software on a processor. The AFU has access to system memory bound to the application software and is adapted to make copies of that memory within AFU memory-cache in the AFU. As part of this memory coherency domain, each of the AFU memory-cache and processor memory-cache is adapted to be aware of changes to data commonly in either cache as well as data changed in memory of which the respective cache contains a copy.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 20, 2015
    Date of Patent: November 22, 2016
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Jesse P. Arroyo, Srinivas Kotta, Gregory M. Nordstrom, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9459908
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing dynamic configuration of a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) virtual function in a virtualized system. A management function, a hypervisor, a hypervisor based PF device driver and a partition based virtual function (VF) device driver are used to implement usage based VF resizing. The management function periodically queries the SRIOV adapter for activity statistics for every assigned virtual function. The management function builds a usage heuristic based on these statistics and calculates VF resource usage based on these statistics. The usage information determines whether VF resources need to be scaled-up or scaled-down. A corresponding resize event is generated and send by the management function to both the hypervisor based PF device driver and partition based VF device driver. Both the PF and VF device drivers scale to the corresponding VF resource of the resize event.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 24, 2015
    Date of Patent: October 4, 2016
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Manu A. Anand, Charles S. Graham, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9459905
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing dynamic configuration of a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) virtual function in a virtualized system. A management function, a hypervisor, a hypervisor based PF device driver and a partition based virtual function (VF) device driver are used to implement usage based VF resizing. The management function periodically queries the SRIOV adapter for activity statistics for every assigned virtual function. The management function builds a usage heuristic based on these statistics and calculates VF resource usage based on these statistics. The usage information determines whether VF resources need to be scaled-up or scaled-down. A corresponding resize event is generated and send by the management function to both the hypervisor based PF device driver and partition based VF device driver. Both the PF and VF device drivers scale to the corresponding VF resource of the resize event.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 16, 2014
    Date of Patent: October 4, 2016
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Manu A. Anand, Charles S. Graham, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9400704
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing distributed debug data collection and analysis for a hardware I/O adapter, such as, a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) adapter in a virtualized system. A predetermined event triggers a base error collection sequence. Adapter driver data is collected and virtual function (VF) device drivers are locked out responsive to triggering the base error collection sequence. Adapter debug data is collected and the adapter is reinitialized including an indication to VF drivers if VF error data is to be collected. The virtual function (VF) device drivers are unlocked allowing the VF device drivers to commence recovery of a respective virtual function (VF).
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 12, 2013
    Date of Patent: July 26, 2016
    Assignee: Globalfoundries Inc.
    Inventors: Charles S. Graham, Robert J. Manulik, John R. Oberly, III, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Publication number: 20160170855
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing shared adapter configuration updates concurrent with maintenance actions for a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) adapter in a computer system. A configuration of the adapter is decoupled from the state of the adapter during a recovery period. When a configuration request is received, the configuration request is validated. Responsive to a valid configuration request, the saved configuration state of the adapter is updated. Once the adapter completes recovery, the adapter is restored to the new configuration instead of the configuration prior to failure.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 20, 2016
    Publication date: June 16, 2016
    Inventors: Charles S. Graham, John R. Oberly, III, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Publication number: 20160170790
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing dynamic configuration of a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) virtual function in a virtualized system. A management function, a hypervisor, a hypervisor based PF device driver and a partition based virtual function (VF) device driver are used to implement usage based VF resizing. The management function periodically queries the SRIOV adapter for activity statistics for every assigned virtual function. The management function builds a usage heuristic based on these statistics and calculates VF resource usage based on these statistics. The usage information determines whether VF resources need to be scaled-up or scaled-down. A corresponding resize event is generated and send by the management function to both the hypervisor based PF device driver and partition based VF device driver. Both the PF and VF device drivers scale to the corresponding VF resource of the resize event.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 24, 2015
    Publication date: June 16, 2016
    Inventors: Manu A. Anand, Charles S. Graham, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Publication number: 20160170789
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing dynamic configuration of a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) virtual function in a virtualized system. A management function, a hypervisor, a hypervisor based PF device driver and a partition based virtual function (VF) device driver are used to implement usage based VF resizing. The management function periodically queries the SRIOV adapter for activity statistics for every assigned virtual function. The management function builds a usage heuristic based on these statistics and calculates VF resource usage based on these statistics. The usage information determines whether VF resources need to be scaled-up or scaled-down. A corresponding resize event is generated and send by the management function to both the hypervisor based PF device driver and partition based VF device driver. Both the PF and VF device drivers scale to the corresponding VF resource of the resize event.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 16, 2014
    Publication date: June 16, 2016
    Inventors: Manu A. Anand, Charles S. Graham, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9323620
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing shared adapter configuration updates concurrent with maintenance actions for a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) adapter in a computer system. A configuration of the adapter is decoupled from the state of the adapter during a recovery period. When a configuration request is received, the configuration request is validated. Responsive to a valid configuration request, the saved configuration state of the adapter is updated. Once the adapter completes recovery, the adapter is restored to the new configuration instead of the configuration prior to failure.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 12, 2013
    Date of Patent: April 26, 2016
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Charles S. Graham, John R. Oberly, III, Timothy J. Schimke
  • Patent number: 9317317
    Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for implementing concurrent adapter driver maintenance and recovery for a Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SRIOV) adapter in a computer system. An adapter driver at start up time performs configuration of the adapter and each of a set of virtual functions (VFs). The adapter driver writes critical adapter and VF configuration data to a scratchpad buffer. When device driver maintenance is needed, such as to load updated adapter driver firmware, all VF drivers are held off temporarily, current adapter driver is detached, and then the adapter driver is reloaded with the updated driver firmware. Then the adapter driver is restarted with the updated adapter driver firmware, and performs a reinitialization process. The adapter driver performs adapter and VF configuration restoring existing configuration using values read from the scratchpad buffer.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 12, 2013
    Date of Patent: April 19, 2016
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Charles S. Graham, John R. Oberly, III, Timothy J. Schimke