Patent ID: 7448037

Claim:
A method of operating a data processing system including at least an integrated circuit processing unit, said method comprising: storing each of plurality of classifications in data storage in association with a respective identifier of a schedulable software entity; software communicating to an integrated circuit processing unit a respective classification of a first schedulable software entity and a second schedulable software entity; said integrated circuit processing unit executing a plurality of schedulable software entities including said first schedulable software entity and said second schedulable software entity; the integrated circuit processing unit monitoring, in hardware, execution of each of the plurality of schedulable software entities within the integrated circuit processing unit in accordance with a monitoring parameter set among one or more monitoring parameter sets; the integrated circuit processing unit receiving said monitoring parameter set from said software and storing said monitoring parameter set in said integrated circuit processing unit; the integrated circuit processing unit reporting to the software executing in the data processing system utilization of hardware resources by each of the plurality of schedulable software entities; and a resource manager comprising integrated circuitry within the integrated circuit processing unit dynamically allocating hardware resources within the integrated circuit processing unit to the first and second schedulable software entities during execution in accordance with the classifications of the first and second schedulable software entities, wherein said dynamically allocating includes modifying an allocation of a hardware resource within the integrated circuit processing unit shared by said first and said second schedulable software entities by increasing an allocation of the shared hardware resource to said first schedulable entity.