Patent ID: 8275949

Claim:
A system for providing a shared high speed persistent storage, the system comprising: a common system storage repository (CSSR), the CSSR comprising: a CSSR repository, the CSSR repository comprising: a non-volatile persistent storage, the non-volatile persistent storage comprising a plurality of partitions of system data; and a volatile run-time repository comprising a volatile storage in communication with the non-volatile persistent storage; and a plurality of point-to-point connections, for providing access to respective portions of said volatile run-time repository to subsystems of a computer system; wherein the CSSR is configured to perform a method comprising: responsive to the CSSR being powered up, copying content of said non-volatile persistent storage into said volatile run-time repository; responsive to the CSSR being powered up, assigning unique portions of said volatile run-time repository corresponding to each of the plurality of partitions to each point-to-point connection of the plurality of point-to-point connections; prioritizing access to each unique portion of said volatile run-time repository; permitting access to each unique portion of said volatile run-time repository by way of only an assigned one of said point-to-point connections according to the prioritization; updating at least one of the unique portions of said volatile run-time repository responsive to the permitting; identifying the at least one unique portion of said volatile run-time repository that has been updated; writing, via a background process, changes in said volatile run-time repository to said non-volatile persistent storage in response to every update to the contents of said volatile run-time repository; and marking, in a flash update history register, responsive to the updating and identifying, that the at least one of the unique portions of said volatile run-time repository has been updated, the marking causing the change to be preserved after a power loss; wherein a size of each of the plurality of partitions is configurable by reprogramming the CSSR.