Patent ID: 8898353

Claim:
A system for supporting I/O virtualization in a computing environment, comprising: a free buffer pool that contains a plurality of packet buffers associated with one or more virtual host bus adaptors (vHBAs) in the network environment, wherein each said vHBA maintains a main linked list of buffer pointers that point to one or more packet buffers in the free buffer pool; a context table defined on an on-chip memory associated with an input/output (I/O) device, wherein the context table maintains a temporary linked list of buffer pointers that point to one or more packet buffers that are allocated from the free buffer pool for a disk read operation; and wherein the I/O device operates to open the context table when the I/O device receives disk read data from a physical host bus adaptor (HBA) that performs the disk read operation, update the temporary linked list of buffer pointers, and merge the temporary linked list of buffer pointers into the main linked list of buffer pointers when the context table is closed.