Patent ID: 7650603

Claim:
A method for sharing graphics adapter resources among multiple partitions in a virtual machine environment, comprising: providing to a first partition a virtual graphics adapter; providing to a second partition a graphics proxy process, wherein the graphics proxy process owns real graphics resources; and controlling access to the real graphics resources using the graphics proxy process when an application in the first partition requests the real graphics resources by way of the virtual graphics adapter; wherein the graphics proxy process also manages access of the application in the first partition in view of requests made by an additional application in an additional and separate partition from the first partition by controlling the amount of access time the application in the first partition has to the real graphics resources wherein the amount of access time the first partition has to the real graphics resources is based on a time bank wherein the time bank controls the access time to the real graphics resources between a first proxy graphics device context and a second proxy graphics device context in the second partition.