Patent ID: 7676645

Claim:
A method, comprising: allocating a plurality of logical memory blocks corresponding to a memory in a computational device; associating an attribute with at least one logical memory block, wherein the attribute indicates whether the at least one logical memory block can be swapped from the memory, and wherein physical blocks corresponding to the at least one logical memory block are contiguous, wherein allocating the plurality of logical memory blocks and associating the attribute are performed during a reinitialized program load by a firmware in the computational device, wherein the computational device includes an operating system that has a limit on an amount of memory that can be reserved for swapping from the memory, and wherein allocating the plurality of logical memory blocks and associating the attribute allow an application to exceed the limit on the amount of memory that can be reserved; and associating an additional attribute with the at least one logical memory block, wherein the additional attribute further characterizes properties of the at least one logical memory block, wherein in response to the at least one memory block being a reserved memory block that cannot be swapped from the memory, the reserved memory block is persistent across repeated initialized program loads of the computational device, wherein in response to the additional attribute indicating customer modified data or customer unmodified data being stored by the application in the at least one logical memory block, the attribute is configured to indicate that the at least one logical memory block cannot be swapped from the memory, and wherein in response to the additional attribute indicating null, the attribute is configured to indicate that the at least one logical memory block is swappable from the memory.