Patent ID: 7702879
Filing Date: 2010-04-20
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. An article of manufacture comprising a computer readable storage medium including code, wherein the code is executed to communicate with a control unit managing access to devices and perform operations, the operations comprising: providing an assignment of base addresses to a group of devices, wherein the base addresses are used to access the devices assigned to the base addresses; transmitting a first command to the control unit to instruct the control unit to operate in a dynamic mode where alias addresses are assigned to an alias address pool associated with the group of devices, wherein the alias addresses in the alias address pool are not assigned to one of the devices in the group to use as an alias address and are available to be dynamically assigned to one of multiple of the devices in the group to service I/O (Input/Output) requests to the devices in response to the I/O requests; processing an I/O request to access one target device comprising one of the group of devices; determining whether the base address assigned to the target device is available; assigning one alias address in the alias address pool not assigned as an alias address to one of the devices in the group to the target device in response to determining that the base address is not available and when operating in the dynamic mode where alias addresses are assigned to the alias address pool; issuing the I/O request to the assigned alias address to transmit the request to the target device; and transmitting a second command to the control unit to operate in a static mode where alias addresses are statically assigned to the base addresses.