Patent ID: 8336055

Claim:
A method for determining status of system resources in a computer system, comprising: loading a first operating system into a first memory of the computer system, wherein the first operating system discovers a plurality of system resources of a first computing system and reserves a number of the system resources for use by an augmenting operating system; loading the augmenting operating system into a second memory of the computer system reserved for the augmenting operating system by the first operating system; accessing the first memory from the augmenting operating system and obtaining data; performing a computation using the augmenting operating system, wherein the computation comprises using the data obtained from the first memory; and outputting the results of the computation using the system resources reserved for the augmenting operating system, wherein the augmenting operating system hosts application software that uses a system service to examine a virtual storage of the first operating system to determine the status of the system resources of the first operating system, wherein the first memory includes the virtual storage.