Figure 5-38: DMA addressing

5.5.2.2.7Run-Time Abstraction Services

System p hardware platforms provide a set of firmware Run-Time Abstraction Services (RTAS) calls. In LPAR, these calls perform additional validation checking and resource virtualization for the partitioned environment. For example, although there is only one physical non-volatile RAM chip, and one physical battery-powered Time-of-Day chip, RTAS makes it appear to each partition as though it has its own non- volatile RAM area, and its own uniquely settable Time-of-Day clock. Because RTAS calls run inside a partition with the operating system, even they are not allowed to access anything outside the partition without a call to the hypervisor.

5.5.2.2.8Preventing denial of service

LPARs run on top of an advanced symmetrical multiprocessor architecture, and some resources are also implicitly shared by the partitions. The hypervisor is designed to keep partitions from using shared resources in a way that would deny or restrict access to those resources by other partitions. A key example is the hypervisor itself, which is implemented as a library of services shared by the partitions. These services are called within the context of the operating system running in each partition. Each service call is dispatched on the specific processor from which the call was made, so hypervisor calls execute only on processors owned by the calling partition. Therefore, regardless of the type and frequency of hypervisor calls made by a partitioned operating system, they can have no effect on hypervisor usage or access in other partitions.

In a similar fashion, the hypervisor and hardware mechanisms protect shared hardware resources. No operation within a partition can take exclusive control of a shared hardware resource, or use a shared resource in a way that inhibits other partitions' access.

5.5.2.3System p native mode

This section describes memory addressing and memory management of System p in native mode. Note that SLES runs on System p in LPAR mode.

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IBM 10 SP1 EAL4 manual Run-Time Abstraction Services, Preventing denial of service, System p native mode