1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to environmental sensing and control and in particular to a local processor using sensors for continuously monitoring environmental conditions within a data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a local processor that utilizes registers arranged in a fault/mask/cache fashion to pass information to system firmware for environmental control and sensing within a data processing system or information handling system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many data processing or computer systems support a standard input/output (I/O) systems conforming to the peripheral component interconnect (PCI) Local Bus architecture, an architecture supporting many complex features including I/O expansion through PCI-to-PCI bridges, peer-to-peer (device-to-device) data transfers, multi-function devices, and both integrated and plug-in devices. These input/output sub-systems may typically be set up in I/O drawer configurations, especially in large server systems having multiple I/O sub-systems. One of the complexities involved in these types of configurations is keeping the I/O drawer at the manufactures recommended operating temperatures and/or keeping enough supply power to run all the devices and operations. Even though personal computers or servers, during normal system operation, run little risk of corrupting data, the risk of data corruption becomes significant when environmental variables change (i.e. temperature) or system components (i.e. power supplies) become defective. This makes environmental sensing a very important feature.
Therefore, it would be ideal if a computer system would monitor environmental data in the background and alert its system only when a change was sensed to protect itself from data corruption. However, a problem arises when trying to bridge the localized environmental sense information of a system component to the system level where an appropriate action can be taken due to hardware and software complexities. Consequently, it would be desirable to provide a method and system for monitoring and controlling at the I/O sub-system level environmental and system component information through an arrangement of simple hardware registers common to both the system firmware and the I/O drawer processor code. The present invention solves these problems in a novel and unique fashion not previously known in the art.