MICHAEL KENDRICK WILLIAMS, M.D.
Osteopathic Medicine at 12 St, Austin, TX

5826090, Oct 20, 1998

Mar 17, 1997

8/820471

Bruce Gerard Mealey - Austin TX
Randal Craig Swanberg - Round Rock TX
Michael Stephen Williams - Austin TX

International Business Machines Corporation - Armonk NY

G06F 906

395712

An improved operating system for a computer provides support for specific hardware components. The operating system is loaded by first loading a base portion which initializes the operating system and determines the particular type of hardware components present. Then, appropriate software components are loaded that are specifically associated with the hardware components. The hardware components can be detected by leaving a trace in the memory device that is associated with the software component and later retrieving the trace, or by testing the computer for the hardware component. The hardware component may be a bus architecture selected from a group of bus architectures, and bus-independent interfaces are defined which are mapped to addresses in the kernel. Alternatively, the software component can include a PAL which contains specific instructions for communicating with the hardware component. The PAL is constructed from a plurality of files each associated with the hardware component.

5758168, May 26, 1998

Apr 18, 1996

8/634468

Bruce Gerard Mealey - Austin TX
James William Van Fleet - Austin TX
Michael Stephen Williams - Austin TX

International Business Machines Corporation - Armonk NY

G06F 946

395733

An exception handler for a computer system, particularly for performance monitoring facilities, employs implementation-dependent steps executed from a kernel extension which is more application-level than kernel level. The implementation-independent kernel is involved only at very minimum level for a prologue to the exception handling routine. First a kernel extension registers an exception with the processor by storing the address of a pointer to a first-level interrupt handler; this address is stored in a location in kernel data storage, in non-paged memory. When an exception condition is reached, state is saved and the address location is checked to see if an exception has been registered. If so, the address is used to go to the first-level interrupt handler, which is at the kernel extension level. The first-level interrupt handler may access a second-level interrupt handler.