Patents by Inventor Timothy MERRIFIELD

Timothy MERRIFIELD 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: 11941422
    Abstract: Various approaches for exposing a virtual Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) locality table to the guest OS of a VM running on NUMA system are provided. These approaches provide different tradeoffs between the accuracy of the virtual NUMA locality table and the ability of the system's hypervisor to migrate virtual NUMA nodes, with the general goal of enabling the guest OS to make more informed task placement/memory allocation decisions.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 14, 2021
    Date of Patent: March 26, 2024
    Assignee: VMware LLC
    Inventors: Timothy Merrifield, Petr Vandrovec, Xunjia Lu, James White
  • Publication number: 20230229473
    Abstract: The performance of a computer system having a virtual machine executing an idling instruction therein is improved by: determining a state for controlling the execution of the idling instruction for a first virtual CPU; when the controlling state is a first state, executing the idling instruction natively in a physical CPU assigned to the first virtual CPU and resuming execution of instructions by the first virtual CPU when the physical CPU wakes up; and when the controlling state is a second state, emulating execution of the idling instruction, the emulated execution including the steps of configuring a wakeup event, descheduling the first virtual CPU, and selecting a second virtual CPU to resume execution of instructions, and in response to the wakeup event, rescheduling the second virtual CPU, performing a task switch from the first to the second virtual CPU, and resuming execution of instructions by the second virtual CPU.
    Type: Application
    Filed: January 18, 2022
    Publication date: July 20, 2023
    Inventors: Timothy MERRIFIELD, Prashant Singh CHOUHAN
  • Publication number: 20230012606
    Abstract: Various approaches for exposing a virtual Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) locality table to the guest OS of a VM running on NUMA system are provided. These approaches provide different tradeoffs between the accuracy of the virtual NUMA locality table and the ability of the system's hypervisor to migrate virtual NUMA nodes, with the general goal of enabling the guest OS to make more informed task placement/memory allocation decisions.
    Type: Application
    Filed: July 14, 2021
    Publication date: January 19, 2023
    Inventors: Timothy Merrifield, Petr Vandrovec, Xunjia Lu, James White
  • Patent number: 10635600
    Abstract: The disclosure provides an approach for tracking metadata (e.g., accessed and dirty bits) of page tables at finer granularity than the size of the page tables. A disclosed herein, modification to existing hardware design may enable finer page table granularity of metadata, leading to more precise representation of the state of memory and an improvement to system performance and efficiency. Finer grain dirty metadata can dramatically improve the efficiency and simplicity of subsystems.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 8, 2018
    Date of Patent: April 28, 2020
    Assignee: VMware, Inc.
    Inventors: Jayneel Gandhi, Christopher J. Rossbach, Timothy Merrifield
  • Publication number: 20190278713
    Abstract: The disclosure provides an approach for tracking metadata (e.g., accessed and dirty bits) of page tables at finer granularity than the size of the page tables. A disclosed herein, modification to existing hardware design may enable finer page table granularity of metadata, leading to more precise representation of the state of memory and an improvement to system performance and efficiency. Finer grain dirty metadata can dramatically improve the efficiency and simplicity of subsystems.
    Type: Application
    Filed: March 8, 2018
    Publication date: September 12, 2019
    Inventors: Jayneel GANDHI, Christopher J. ROSSBACH, Timothy MERRIFIELD