Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-22 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
Step 1 (MPEP § 2106.03): Claim 1 recites “A non-transitory, computer-readable medium comprising a program code that, when the program code is executed on a processor, a computer, or a programmable hardware component, causes the processor, computer, or programmable hardware component to,” which is directed to a statutory category.
Step 2A Prong 1 (MPEP § 2106.04(a)): Claim 1 recites “determine an impending access to a functionality provided by a virtual machine,” which amounts to an abstract idea (mental process). For example, a human operator could mentally an impending access by viewing data on a terminal. Accordingly, claim 1 recites an abstract idea (mental process).
Step 2A Prong 2 (MPEP § 2106.04(d)): Claim 1 additionally recites “restore a subset of memory pages associated with the virtual machine from a compressed memory pool to uncompressed memory according to a memory restoration template after determining the impending access to the virtual machine.” The restoring amounts to insignificant extra-solution activity of mere data gathering. Courts have found that “[p]resenting offers to potential customers and gathering statistics generated based on the testing about how potential customers responded to the offers; the statistics are then used to calculate an optimized price” amounts to mere data gathering. MPEP § 2106.05(g) (citing OIP Technologies, 788 F.3d at 1363, 115 USPQ2d at 1092-93). Here, the restoring corresponds to the presenting in OIP Technologies. Accordingly, the restoring does not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application.
Step 2B (MPEP § 2106.05): Claim 1 additionally recites “restore a subset of memory pages associated with the virtual machine from a compressed memory pool to uncompressed memory according to a memory restoration template after determining the impending access to the virtual machine.” The restoring amounts to insignificant extra-solution activity of mere data gathering. Courts have found that “[p]resenting offers to potential customers and gathering statistics generated based on the testing about how potential customers responded to the offers; the statistics are then used to calculate an optimized price” amounts to mere data gathering. MPEP § 2106.05(g) (citing OIP Technologies, 788 F.3d at 1363, 115 USPQ2d at 1092-93). Here, the restoring corresponds to the presenting in OIP Technologies. Accordingly, the restoring does not amount to significantly more than an abstract idea.
Therefore, claim 1 is ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
Regarding claim 2, it further recites providing the functionality using a VM as a FaaS, which amounts to mere instructions to apply an exception. See MPEP § 2106.05(f). Accordingly, claim 2 is ineligible.
Regarding claim 3, it recites a plurality of VMs, therefore, it amounts to mere instructions to apply an exception. See MPEP § 2106.05(f). Accordingly, claim 3 is ineligible.
Regarding claims 4-7, they further refine the restoration of memory pages, which amount to mere data gathering for the same reasons as the initial restoring limitations. Accordingly, claims 4-7 are ineligible.
Regarding claims 8-9, they are directed to generating a restoration template, which can be performed in the human mind by viewing data on a computer terminal and making mental determinations. Accordingly, claims 8-9 are ineligible.
Regarding claims 10-19, they further refine the restoration of memory pages, which amount to mere data gathering for the same reasons as the initial restoring limitations. Accordingly, claims 10-19 are ineligible.
Regarding claims 20-22, they correspond to claims 1; therefore, they are ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for the same reasons.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claim(s) 1-22 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Haghighat (US 2021/0263779) and further in view of Beveridge (US 2016/0055021).
Regarding claim 1, Haghighat teaches: A non-transitory, computer-readable medium comprising a program code that, when the program code is executed on a processor, a computer, or a programmable hardware component, causes the processor, computer, or programmable hardware component to:
determine an impending access to a functionality (¶ 572, “the scheduler 2014 may predict whether several functions will concurrently operate based on the control flow graphs and/or statistical analysis of how frequently the activation of one type of function led to the activation of the same or another type of function”) provided by a virtual machine (¶ 160, “The orchestrator 404 optimizes execution of the functions (e.g., whether by a container, a virtual machine, a process, etc.) within available compute resources by spinning up containers or other execution engines for the function code 412”).
Haghighat does not teach; however, Beveridge discloses: restore a subset of memory pages associated with the virtual machine (¶ 96, “At 704, the memory blocks that are associated with the powered-off child VM 312, but are not associated with the powered-on parent VM template 310, are retrieved from storage”) from a compressed memory pool to uncompressed memory (¶ 97, “If any of the retrieved memory blocks are compressed, at 706 the compressed memory blocks are decompressed”) according to a memory restoration template after determining the impending access to the virtual machine (¶ 55, “Each of the powered-off child VMs 312 is instantiated, on demand, from one of the plurality of parent VM templates 310”).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art, at the effective filing date of the invention, to have applied the known technique of restore a subset of memory pages associated with the virtual machine from a compressed memory pool to uncompressed memory according to a memory restoration template after determining the impending access to the virtual machine, as taught by Beveridge, in the same way to determined impending access, as taught by Haghighat. Both inventions are in the field of restoring VM pages, and combining them would have predictably resulted in a system configured to “quickly suspend and resume virtual desktops on demand or on schedule,” as indicated by Beveridge (abstract).
Regarding claim 2, Haghighat teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein the functionality provided by the virtual machine is a Function as a Service (FaaS) provided by the virtual machine (¶ 154, “One example of the FaaS container is FaaS architecture 406 of FIG. 4 (discussed below). After execution, the container is wiped (or reset, reinitialized, etc.) for new functions. Containers often run within virtual machines (VMs) for security and isolation”).
Regarding claim 3, Haghighat teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein the virtual machine is one of a plurality of virtual machines providing the functionality being hosted by a computer system (¶ 596, “A CLOS may be a software-assigned tag into which threads/apps/VMs/containers may be grouped”).
Regarding claim 4, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein the memory restoration template defines the subset of memory pages to be restored from the compressed memory pool to the uncompressed memory (¶ 8, “The child VM only tracks and records its own writes to memory, creating copy-on-write (COW) pages. When a request for suspension of the child VM is received, the child VM compresses the COW pages and transfers them to storage. The compressed COW pages are then decompressed, in some examples, only upon demand after the child VM is resumed”).
Regarding claim 5, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 4, wherein at least one memory page associated with the virtual machine is omitted from restoration according to the memory restoration template (¶ 28, “The ability to eliminate the shared memory pages represents a significant advance, reducing the amount of data handled by a suspend/resume operation by, for example, 75%”).
Regarding claim 6, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 4, wherein the memory restoration template is based on monitored memory accesses of at least one of the virtual machine, an equivalent virtual machine, and a hypervisor (¶ 27, “VMFork-based desktops entail the ability to know at the hypervisor level which memory pages in the desktop VM are shared and which are unique”).
Regarding claim 7, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 6, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to monitor memory accesses of at least one of the virtual machine, the equivalent virtual machine, and the hypervisor, and to generate the memory restoration template based on the monitored memory accesses (¶ 26, “VMFork uses linked clones but also has a COW memory strategy such that all content is initially shared and changes are tracked as COW memory pages for each child VM”).
Regarding claim 8, Haghighat teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 7, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to monitor the memory accesses across a plurality of warm boot sequences of the virtual machine or equivalent virtual machine (¶ 154, “If a function has run recently, a new function may be placed in an already “warm” container, decreasing instantiation latency. A warm container may be a container that was recently used to execute a function, or a container that is frequently used for function execution”), and to generate the memory restoration template based on the monitored memory accesses occurring across the plurality of warm boot sequences (¶ 936, “pre-activate those functions for whom the activation time (warm-up) time is non-trivial”).
Regarding claim 9, Haghighat teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 8, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to omit memory accesses from the generation of the memory restoration template that occur non-consistently across the plurality of warm boot sequences (¶ 581, “a comparison of warm data container volume 2044 to initialization data volume 2046 illustrates that a memory footprint enhancement may be achieved by tearing down a warm container 2044, storing the initialization data in one or more dedicated caches, and reinitializing a container from the initialization data”).
Regarding claim 10, Haghighat teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 7, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to monitor page faults to monitor the memory accesses (¶ 1041, “The time or event-punctuated trace may be annotated with events which occurred during trace collection (e.g., interrupts or other signals, timeouts, page faults, etc.), and when they occurred in fine grained time units, starting with the execution of the function”).
Regarding claim 11, Haghighat teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 7, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to use an event-based monitoring functionality of a processor being used to execute the virtual machine or equivalent virtual machine to monitor the memory accesses (¶ 5, “FIG. 2A illustrates a generalized existing serverless service platform 203 for providing function as a service, which receives serverless function code 201 uploaded by a computer application developer, and executes the function code 201 triggered by a corresponding event”).
Regarding claim 12, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein restoring the subset of memory pages comprises decompressing the memory pages (¶ 8, “The compressed COW pages are then decompressed, in some examples, only upon demand after the child VM is resumed”).
Regarding claim 13, Haghighat teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 12, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to decompress at least some memory pages the subset of memory pages using a hardware-based decompression functionality of a processor being used to execute the virtual machine (¶ 158, “the FaaS server configuration 300 enables the CSP to match each workload (e.g., transcode, inference, specialized operations, etc.) with an optimal piece of silicon such as the accelerator 314a-314n, the FPGA 318a-318n, the CPU 308a-308n, the GPUs 322a-322n, etc”).
Regarding claim 14, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein the subset of memory pages comprises at least one of memory pages associated with state information of a hypervisor, with the state information being associated with the virtual machine, and memory pages being allocated to the virtual machine (¶ 20, “From the hypervisor perspective, there are two classes of pages: those maintained by the parent (e.g., the child VMs initially include just pointers to parent VM pages), and ones generated and maintained by the child VM, hereafter referred to as copy-on-write (COW) pages.”).
Regarding claim 15, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to detect the virtual machine accessing one or more of the memory pages while the one or more memory pages are stored in the compressed memory pool, and to determine the impending access to the functionality provided by the virtual machine based on the detected access to the one or more memory pages (¶ 29, “The VM to be resumed is made live almost immediately and its memory pages may be decompressed asynchronously as the user starts to work on it with accessed pages being decompressed on-demand”).
Regarding claim 16, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 15, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to detect the virtual machine accessing one or more of the memory pages while the one or more memory pages are stored in the compressed memory pool based on one or more page faults resulting from the access (¶ 1041, “The time or event-punctuated trace may be annotated with events which occurred during trace collection (e.g., interrupts or other signals, timeouts, page faults, etc.), and when they occurred in fine grained time units, starting with the execution of the function”).
Regarding claim 17, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to detect a warm boot sequence of the virtual machine (¶ 29, “Resuming a VM whose memory pages are already in RAM is faster. The VM to be resumed is made live almost immediately”), and to determine the impending access to the functionality provided by the virtual machine (¶ 29, “The VM to be resumed is made live almost immediately and its memory pages may be decompressed asynchronously as the user starts to work on it”) and restore the subset of memory pages based on the detection of the warm boot sequence (¶ 29, “its memory pages may be decompressed asynchronously as the user starts to work on it with accessed pages being decompressed on-demand”).
Regarding claim 18, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 1, wherein the virtual machine is one of a plurality of virtual machines being hosted by a computer system, each of the virtual machines hosting the functionality, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to monitor a utilization of the functionality being provided by the plurality of virtual machines over time (¶ 34, “the retrieval aspects (e.g., from storage back to the staging area in RAM) rely on a history log, or other maintained history data describing user connect habits, disconnect habits, re-connect habits, and/or other user behavior cycles”), and to determine the impending access to the functionality provided by the virtual machine (¶ 33, “for users with a record of logging in regularly, a heuristic analysis may provide the average time of day when they reconnect to the system”) and restore the subset of memory pages based on the monitored utilization of the plurality of virtual machines over time (¶ 33, “The criteria may be defined based on heuristics, and may be performed proactively (e.g., ahead of user re-connection points)”).
Regarding claim 19, Beveridge teaches: The non-transitory, computer-readable medium according to claim 18, wherein the program code comprises machine-readable instructions to predict the utilization of the functionality in the future based on the monitored utilization of the plurality of virtual machines over time, and to determine the impending access to the functionality provided by the virtual machine and restore the subset of memory pages based on the predicted utilization in the future (¶ 33, “The compressed pages of the VM may be proactively retrieved from storage and placed back into the staging area to ensure a very rapid resume”).
Claims 20-22 recite commensurate subject matter as claim 1. Therefore, they are rejected for the same reasons.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Ravichandran (US 10,956,173) discloses “improving the boot performance of an operating system (OS) used to launch a virtual machine” (abstract), which relates to the disclosed restoring memory pages of a VM.
Zwiegincew (US 6,633,968) discloses “[a] method for pre-fetching of pages prior to a hard page fault sequence” (abstract), which relates to the disclosed restoring memory pages of a VM.
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/JACOB D DASCOMB/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2198