Patent ID: 7941804

Claim:
A system comprising: a plurality of partitions that provide isolated operating environments for execution of software processes, wherein said plurality of partitions are arranged in a tiered manner with different partition types at different tiers, said types including at least two types selected from a set consisting of: hardware partitions, said hardware partitions being physically defined containers for providing electrically isolated environments for executing respective operating systems in a computer system virtual partitions, said virtual partitions being logically defined containers configured to provide functionally isolated environments for executing respective operating systems in a computer system, hardware partition, or other virtual partition, and resource partitions, said resource partitions being logically defined and functionally isolated containers configured to provide isolated environments for executing respective applications within an operating system environment; hardware resources allocable to said partitions; a data structure for representing a hierarchical arrangement of said partitions, wherein said data structure comprises multiple nodes, each of said nodes corresponding to a respective one of said partitions and links between said nodes representing parent-child relationships between pairs of said partitions; and an arbiter software module for allocating said hardware resources among partitions of at least two of said types, wherein said arbiter software module receives requests to allocate hardware resources to said plurality of partitions and traverses said data structure to determine which requests to satisfy.