Abstract: A mail-receive noticing system and method and provided for automatically notifying a destination terminal of a fact that an electronic mail reaches a host computer. A mail-sending terminal includes a mail-receiving notice instructing device for accepting a mail-receiving notice instruction of a sender on the sending terminal given depending upon urgency or importance level of the mail and an information sending device for sending mail-receiving notice instructing information generated based on the accepted mail-receiving notice instruction, together with a sending signal of an electronic mail to a host computer. The host computer includes a device for receiving the mail-receiving notice instructing information from a sending terminal and processing devices for generating a mail-receiving notice indication based on the received mail-receiving notice instructing information and sending the same to a receiving terminal.

Abstract: A virtual machine system has a processor operating as a base machine which includes a plurality of groups of registers, such as data registers, address registers and instruction address registers which are selected according to identification data identifying individual virtual machines. A respective group of registers is allotted to each virtual machine and to the virtual machine monitor in the system. A status register file is provided to effect selective access to a respective one of a plurality of status registers in the system in accordance with a virtual machine number. An interrupt processing portion is provided comparing the value of an interrupt mask level of the status word of a corresponding virtual machine with an externally generated interrupt level to control interrupt processing.

Abstract: At an occurrence of an interrupt, each entry of the vector table of the vitrual machine monitor to be referenced by the hardware of the bare machine is loaded with an address of an interrupt processing program of the running virtual machine for an interrupt number associated with the entry. When the interrupt is allowed to be directly processed by the virtual machine, the virtual machine monitor is not activated, that is, the interrupt processing program of the vitual machine can immediately execute the necessary processing, which eliminates the overhead associated with the intervention of the virtual machine monitor. Moreover, the content of the system stack pointer is set to point to the stack of the running virtual machine. Consequently, the content of the registers to be saved for an interrupt processing are directly stored in the stack of the running virtual machine, and therefore the overhead caused because the stack of the virtual machine monitor is used is removed.