Patent ID: 7512717

Claim:
A Fibre Channel (FC) controller shareable by a plurality of operating system domains (OSDs) within a load-store architecture, comprising: a plurality of control/status register (CSR) banks, wherein a respective one of said plurality of CSR banks is used by each of the plurality of OSDs to request the shared FC controller to perform I/O operations with remote FC devices; a load-store bus interface, coupled to said plurality of CSR banks, for coupling to a load-store bus, configured to receive, via said load-store bus, load and store transactions from each of the plurality of OSDs, each of said load and store transactions including an OSD identifier for identifying one of the plurality of OSDs that initiated said transaction, wherein said load-store bus interface directs each of said load and store transactions to said respective one of said plurality of CSR banks based on said OSD identifier; and a FC port, coupled to said load-store bus interface, configured to obtain a distinct FC port identifier for each of the plurality of OSDs, and to transceive FC frames with said remote FC devices using said distinct FC port identifier for each of the plurality of OSDs in response to an I/O operation requests, wherein said FC port comprises the FC Node Loop Port (NL_Port) for communication on the FC arbitrated loop, wherein said FC NL_Port obtains a respective FC Arbitrated Loop Physical Address (AL_PA) for each of the plurality of OSDs, wherein said distinct port identifier for each of the plurality of OSDs comprises said respective FC AL_PA.