Patent ID: 7827331

Claim:
Information platform equipment which provides an application program operated thereon with capsule interfaces serving as an interface to encapsulate desired communication protocols for data communication, comprising: an IO driver including: a capsule interface information setting means for generating, in response requests for generation of said capsule interfaces, capsule interface identifiers for identifying respective ones of said capsule interfaces, and for setting bandwidth information indicating a data transfer bandwidth assigned to each of said capsule interfaces identified by the capsule interface identifiers, respectively; a descriptor generator means for generating, in response to a data transfer request from an application program, a respective capsule interface descriptor for each of said capsule interfaces, each capsule interface descriptor including a plurality of descriptors having data transfer control information for a corresponding capsule interface, and for arranging said plurality of descriptors into one or more descriptor groups within said capsule interface descriptors, wherein a number of said plurality of descriptors belonging to each of said descriptor groups is determined by said bandwidth information set respectively for each of said capsule interfaces; a ring scheduler means for registering descriptor ring entries for said capsule interface descriptors into a ring scheduler information table, said entries being equal in number to a number of said plurality of descriptors consumed by the respective capsule interfaces at each predetermined cycle time and to the number of said plurality of descriptors belonging to each of said descriptor groups of respective ones of said capsule interface descriptors; and a descriptor registration means for copying descriptors belonging to one of said descriptor groups from each of said capsule interface descriptors, to a descriptor ring in accordance with information registered in the ring scheduler information table, said descriptor registration means being enabled at said each predetermined cycle time; and an IO adapter having a DMA engine and a descriptor control unit, and executing DMA data transfer between a main memory of the information platform equipment and the IO adapter in accordance with the descriptors copied to the descriptor ring.