A method and apparatus for preventing the occurrence of deadlocks from the execution of unresolvable system bus operations. In general, each snooper speculatively accepts a given operation when it has a snoop buffer available. However, rather than unconditionally processing the operation, the snooper waits to determine if another participant retried the operation due to unavailability of a snoop buffer. If some snooping participant retrys an operation, all snoopers that speculatively accepted an operation for processing abandon said operation. If no snooping participant retrys the operation, sufficient snooping resources were available for all necessary caches to begin processing the operation and the initiator can consider the operation completed. In other words, no operation is processed until all the necessary snooping resources are available to accept the operation. This prevents the system from getting into the ping-pong deadlock. Snoopers can safely assume that each presentation of an operation must be propagated and that no operation will have been fully or partially processed by some other snooper. The operation cannot proceed until all of the available resources are available and once available, the operation is propagated only once by those snooping resources.
CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
The present patent application is related to Ser. No. 09/004,144, entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXECUTING MULTIPLY-INITIATED MULTIPLY-SOURCED VARIABLE DELAY SYSTEM BUS OPERATIONS" which is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
The present patent application is related to Ser. No. 09/004,146, entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXECUTING SINGLY-INITIATED, MULTIPLY-SOURCED VARIABLE DELAY SYSTEM BUS OPERATIONS" which is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
The present patent application is related to Ser. No. 09/004,149, entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXECUTING SINGLY-INITIATED, SINGLY-SOURCED VARIABLE DELAY SYSTEM BUS OPERATIONS" which is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
The present patent application is related to Ser. No. 09/004,148, entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXECUTING MULTIPLY-INITIATED, MULTIPLY-SOURCED VARIABLE DELAY SYSTEM BUS OPERATIONS" which is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
The present patent application is related to Ser. No. 09/004,137, entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXECUTING MULTIPLY-INITIATED, SINGLY-SOURCED VARIABLE DELAY SYSTEM BUS OPERATIONS" which is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
The present patent application is related to Ser. No. 09/004,147, entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXECUTING VARIABLE DELAY SYSTEM BUS OPERATIONS OF DIFFERING CHARACTER USING SHARED BUFFERS" which is hereby incorporated by reference herein.
Provided are a method, system and article of manufacture for managing devices, wherein in certain embodiments a request implemented via at least one device independent class is received. A class hierarchy database is traversed to determine at least one device specific class that corresponds to the at least one device independent class, wherein the class hierarchy database stores a class hierarchy and associations between classes. The received request is modified, wherein in the modified request the least one device independent class has been translated to the at least one device specific class.
