Virtualization technologies abstract the association between hardware and software so that software such as an operating system (OS) can operate hardware through abstraction layers, not by direct control.
Virtualization technologies themselves have been around since the days of mainframe dominance. The purpose of such technologies was to run a plurality of basic systems on a single set of hardware so that the expensive hardware could be used more efficiently.
With the advancement of technology and the penetration of open source software, it is now possible to construct virtual environments even on inexpensive servers easily.
As a technology related to the present invention, PTL 1 describes a PCI device in which the address space of a configuration register is defined within the address space of a memory-mapped I/O register. The configuration register is accessed by specifying addresses of the configuration register which are defined within the address space of the memory-mapped I/O register.
PTL 2 describes a computer system that incorporates both PCI and non-PCI devices. A storage area storing at least predetermined identification information on a virtual PCI device associated with a non-PCI device is prepared on the system-BIOS side. The predetermined identification information of the virtual PCI device is stored into a header area of the configuration space of the virtual PCI device on a medium which the system BIOS can refer to.
{Citation List}
{Patent Literature}
{PTL 1} JP-A-2002-318779
{PTL 2} JP-A-2005-250975
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