DETAILED ACTION
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 § 103
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.
1. Claims 1-5, 8-12, and 15-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Nachum et al. (US 8,208,380), “Nachum”, in view of Jain et al. (US 2006/0090039), “Jain”.
2. As per claim 1, Nachum discloses circuitry configured to: responsive to an indication that one or more command packets are ready to be processed [received packets to be processed according to incoming command(s), abstract]: a primary queue and a secondary queue [buffers, column 1, lines 19-29].
Nachum does not disclose expressly fetching at least one (command) packet and at least one auxiliary data packet; and processing (commands of) the at least one (command) packet using auxiliary data of the at least one auxiliary data packet.
Jain discloses processing fetched packet based on a pre-fetched metadata in the abstract.
Nachum and Jain are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor of packet management.
Before the effective filing date of the application, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to modify Nachum by including the metadata based packet processing as taught by Jain in the abstract.
The motivation for doing so would have been cheaper performance management as expressly taught by Jain in the abstract.
3. As per claim 2, the cited prior arts disclose wherein each of the first queue and the second queue is a circular buffer storing data in a contiguous manner [figure 1, Nachum].
4. As per claim 3, the cited prior arts disclose wherein: each of the command packets has a first fixed size and each of the auxiliary data packets has a second fixed size; and a beginning of the second queue is located a fixed offset from a beginning of the first queue [fixed size buffers separate from each other, figure 2, Nachum].
5. As per claim 4, the cited prior arts disclose wherein: each of the command packets comprises commands generated by a host processing circuit [a system controller, column 2, lines 30-45, Nachum]; and one or more of the auxiliary data packets comprises data items used as function call arguments by commands of a corresponding command packet [processing fetched packet based on a pre-fetched metadata, abstract, Jain].
6. As per claim 5, the cited prior arts disclose herein: one or more of the auxiliary data packets has a variable size [paragraph 35, Jain]; and each of the first queue and the second queue has a respective write index and read index [location identification(s) for write/read operation, figure 5, Nachum].
7. As per claims 8-12 and 15-19, the examiner directs the applicant’s attention to claim rejection above.
Conclusion
A. Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 6, 7, 13, 14, and 20 are objected to.
The closest prior art of record, “Nachum” discloses managing multiple buffers in the abstract.
The primary reasons for allowance of claims 6, 13, and 20 in the instant application is the combination with the inclusion in these claims that “wherein the circuitry is configured to retrieve, from a memory register, a total size of auxiliary data to be used by the one or more command packets generated by a host processing circuit during an atomic write operation”. The prior art of record neither anticipates nor renders obvious the above recited combination.
As allowable subject matter has been indicated, applicant's response must either comply with all formal requirements or specifically traverse each requirement not complied with. See 37 C.F.R. § 1.111(b) and § 707.07(a) of the MPEP.
B. Claims Rejected
Claims 1-5, 8-12, and 15-19 are rejected.
C. Direction for Future Remarks
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAE UN YU whose telephone number is (571)272-1133. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9-5.
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/JAE U YU/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2138
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