Patent attributes
Software emulations of physical devices allow protocol neutral communications between heterogeneous operating systems. Within a computing node of a storage cluster, a logical communications cut-through device connects a guest operating system to a front end adapter and enables the guest operating system to perform operations on an allocated portion of computing node memory without hypervisor intervention. The cut-through device may implement an industry standard memory-mapped interface, thereby enabling a guest operating system to discover the cut-through device and obtain access to memory that is shared with the hypervisor and/or another guest OS. Moreover, if guest OSs and/or the hypervisor share any communications protocol then the channel may be utilized at memory speeds. This may be advantageous in symmetric multiprocessing environments in which multiple guest OSs can have core affinities.
