Quoting the Macintosh News Network

On November 23, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two of Apple’s patent applications which were both filed in July 2006 and respectfully titled ‘Virtualization of graphics resources.’ Apple’s patents relate generally to computer graphics, and more particularly to virtualizing resources for computer graphics. In many instances, the patent points to OpenGL and GART (graphics address re-mapping table) entries.

Although Apple isn’t listed as the official assignee, which is a common practice these days, the patent does list Ken *** who was listed on a previous Apple patent (number 20060152518) for an iPod harness.

Patent Background

A graphics kernel driver typically interfaces between graphics client drivers and graphics hardware to assign graphics resources to each client driver and to administer the submission of graphics commands to the graphics hardware. Each client driver has explicit knowledge of the graphics resources it is assigned and references the resources in its commands using the physical address of the resources. As more sophisticated graphics features are developed, the demand for graphics resources is ever increasing but the graphics resources are limited by the graphics hardware and other system constraints. The assigned resources cannot be shared among clients because the graphics hardware is not designed to handle resource contention among the clients. Additionally, the client drivers are required to manage their own internal resource conflicts. For example, they must handle their attempts to use more than available graphics memory.

Apple’s Summary

Graphics resources are virtualized through an interface between graphics hardware and graphics clients. The interface allocates the graphics resources across multiple graphics clients, processes commands for access to the graphics resources from the graphics clients, and resolves conflicts for the graphics resources among the clients.

In one aspect, the interface is a graphics kernel that assigns an identifier to a resource when allocated by a graphics client and the client uses the identifier instead of an address for the resource when requesting access to the resource.

Because the native command structure for the graphics hardware is unaffected by the virtualization, neither the applications nor the hardware require modification to operate in conjunction with the present invention. Furthermore, because the virtualized resources appear as unlimited resources to the graphics clients, the clients can be simplified since, for example, they are no longer required to de-fragment or compact their assigned resources.

The present invention describes systems, methods, and machine-readable media of varying scope.

The patent lists John Stauffer, Bob Beretta and Ken *** as the inventors.

NOTICE: MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details.

Written and researched by Neo.

Read the original, here.