Patent ID: 8387049

Claim:
A method of facilitating management of state information, said method comprising: associating guest state information of a guest of the computing environment with a block of memory assigned to the guest, the associating comprising defining one or more available guest memory states, wherein a guest memory state describes a state of the block of memory as it relates to the guest, said guest being executed by a virtual machine of the computing environment, said virtual machine being managed by a host coupled to the virtual machine and being of a pageable model in which memory of the virtual machine is backed by host virtual memory instead of real memory, and wherein current guest state information is maintained in one or more control blocks in memory of the host, the current guest state information comprising one of the available guest memory states indicating the current state of the block of memory assigned to the guest; and providing to the guest state information of the block of memory assigned to the guest absent host involvement, wherein the guest state information provided to the guest comprises a guest memory state indicating a particular meaning contents of the block of memory have to the guest, and wherein the providing comprises directly accessing the one or more control blocks maintained in memory of the host without host involvement to provide the guest state information to the guest.