Patent ID: 7441112

Claim:
An article of manufacture, comprising: a computer readable storage medium including a plurality of instructions which when executed perform operations comprising: designating a first processing unit of a computer system, during a pre-boot phase of the computer system, to be used by an Input/Output (I/O) operating system; designating a second processing unit of the computer system, during the pre-boot phase, to be used by a general purpose operating system; partitioning memory of the computer system, during the pre-boot phase, into a first portion to be used by the I/O operating system and a second portion to be used by the general purpose operating system, wherein the first and second portions include a shared memory portion that is to be accessible to the general purpose operating system and the I/O operating system, wherein the I/O operating system to perform network transactions for the general purpose operating system, wherein transmission control protocol and Internet protocol (“TCP/IP”) operations of the general purpose operating system are offloaded to the I/O operating system to perform the network transactions for the general purpose operating system, wherein designating the first processing unit includes: configuring one or more links of the computer system to hard partition the first processing unit from the second processing unit; and configuring route tables associated with the one or more links, wherein configuring the route tables associated with the one or more links includes; excluding routes to access the first portion of the memory, that is not part of the shared memory portion, by the general purpose operating system; and excluding routes to access the second portion of the memory, that is not part of the shared memory portion, by the I/O operating system.