Patent ID: 8386648

Claim:
A disk controller for implementing efficient disk I/O for a computer system, comprising: a bus interface for interfacing with a processor and a system memory of the computer system; a disk I/O engine coupled to the bus interface; a bus master controller coupled to the disk I/O engine; a plurality of bypass registers coupled to the bus master controller, wherein each bypass register of the plurality of bypass registers is memory mapped and aggregates disk transaction information therein through memory mapped data transfers from a host CPU; an arbiter couple to the bus master controller and the disk I/O engine, to coordinate data transfers within the disk controller; a chain memory coupled to the disk I/O engine for buffering a plurality of CPBs to extend a number of disk transactions scheduled for execution by the disk I/O engine; and a device interface coupled to the disk I/O engine for interfacing the disk I/O engine with a disk drive, wherein the disk I/O engine is configured to cause a start up of the disk drive upon receiving a disk start up command from the processor and before packaging of a disk transaction information associated with the start up, the start up command configured to hide a start latency of the disk drive, the disk I/O engine further configured to execute the disk transaction by processing the disk transaction information from the bypass register coupled to the disk I/O engine.