Patent ID: 8607020

Claim:
A method of managing access to logical memory pages in a data processing system comprising multiple logical partitions, the method comprising: providing a shared pool of memory within main physical memory of the data processing system, the shared pool comprising a volume of physical memory with dynamically adjustable sub-volumes associated with different logical partitions of the multiple logical partitions, and comprising logical memory pages thereof mapped to physical memory, wherein the physical memory in the shared pool is overcommitted, with a sum of the logical memory pages assigned to the different logical partitions exceeding an amount of physical memory in the shared pool and at least one logical partition at the multiple logical partitions having an apparent amount of physical memory assigned thereto larger than an actual amount of physical memory assigned thereto; interfacing the multiple logical partitions and the shared pool via a hypervisor memory manager facility of a hypervisor of the data processing system, the interfacing comprising: configuring the hypervisor memory manager to manage routine access, by the multiple logical partitions, to logical memory pages within the shared pool; and configuring the hypervisor manager to manage transparently to the multiple logical partitions, during runtime, page-out of logical memory pages from the shared pool to one or more external paging devices and page-in of logical memory pages from the one or more external paging devices to the shared pool, wherein the page-out and the page-in of logical memory pages for the multiple logical partitions by the hypervisor memory manager during runtime are transparent to the multiple logical partitions, and the amount of physical memory in the shared pool is a set amount of physical memory.