The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
DETAILED ACTION
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.
Claim 7 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claim is directed to a software product. The claimed subject matter may be reasonably construed as software per se because the specification does not define the claimed “computer program product having program code stored on a machine-readable carrier, wherein the program code is executed by a computer” as being non-transitory. As such, one of ordinary skill could reasonably interpret the invention embodied by the claims in question as software in a transitory medium, which is not a manufacture, machine, process or composition of matter and is not believed to be functionally and structurally interconnected with any (non-transitory) storage medium in such a manner as to enable it to act as a computer component and realize it's functionality. Thus, the claim fails to meet the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 101. Note that adding the words non-transitory to the machine-readable storage medium will overcome the instant rejection.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1, 7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor, or for pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention. At least the following limitation fails to conform with idiomatic English, possibly a literal translation into English from a foreign document, such that the meaning/scope of the limitation is not clear: “which each first user is assigned a second operating system user who is unique across the one or more container instances and for whom the memory restriction of the respective first user is valid, wherein the second operating system user is a user in the predefined Linux operating system who was not used in the predefined Linux operating system before being assigned to the first user wherein the user assignment is defined based on a Linux user namespace”. Who is a subject pronoun — it refers to the person performing the action of a verb. Whom is an object pronoun — it refers to the person receiving the action of a verb or completing the meaning of a preposition. Page 3 of the specification indicates that the user is non-human (“The first user is a (non-human) technical user provided with an appropriate authorization to execute one or more processes of the corresponding container instance”). Dependent claims 2-6, 9-12 are rejected on dependency merits.
Claim 7 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor, or for pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention because claim 1 defines a predefined Linux operating system and analogous independent claim 7 defines both a predefined Linux operating system and a predefined operating system before referring back to “the predefined operating system” such that it is unclear if the two defined operating systems are intended to be different or the same and accordingly which of the possible operating systems the subsequent recitations of the predefined operating system refer back to.
Claims 1 & 7 are rejected because they contain the trademark/trade name Linux. Where a trademark or trade name is used in a claim as a limitation to identify or describe a particular material or product, the claim does not comply with the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph. See Ex parte Simpson, 218 USPQ 1020 (Bd. App. 1982). The claim scope is uncertain since the trademark or trade name cannot be used properly to identify any particular material or product. A trademark or trade name is used to identify a source of goods, and not the goods themselves. Thus, a trademark or trade name does not identify or describe the goods associated with the trademark or trade name. In the present case, the trademark/trade name is used to identify/describe an operating system and, accordingly, the identification/description is indefinite.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Araujo US PGPUB # 20190068641 teaches: Rapid deployments of application-level deceptions (i.e., booby traps) implant cyber deceptions into running legacy applications both on production and decoy systems. Once a booby trap is tripped, the affected code is moved into a decoy sandbox for further monitoring and forensics. To this end, this disclosure provides for unprivileged, lightweight application sandboxing to facilitate monitoring and analysis of attacks as they occur, all without the overhead of current state-of-the-art approaches. Preferably, the approach transparently moves the suspicious process to an embedded decoy sandbox, with no disruption of the application workflow (i.e., no process restart or reload). Further, the action of switching execution from the original operating environment to the sandbox preferably is triggered from within the running process.
Giles NPL “Container-based virtualization for byte-addressable NVM data storage” teaches Container based virtualization is rapidly growing in popularity for cloud deployments and applications as a virtualization alternative due to the ease of deployment coupled with high-performance. Emerging byte-addressable, nonvolatile memories, commonly called Storage Class Memory or SCM, technologies are promising both byte-addressability and persistence near DRAM speeds operating on the main memory bus. These new memory alternatives open up a new realm of applications that no longer have to rely on slow, block-based persistence, but can rather operate directly on persistent data using ordinary loads and stores through the cache hierarchy coupled with transaction techniques. However, SCM presents a new challenge for container-based applications, which typically access persistent data through layers of block based file isolation. Traditional persistent data accesses in containers are performed through layered file access, which slows byte-addressable persistence and transactional guarantees, or through direct access to drivers, which do not provide for isolation guarantees or security. This paper presents a high-performance containerized version of byte-addressable, non-volatile memory (SCM) for applications running inside a container that solves performance challenges while providing isolation guarantees. We created an open-source container-aware Linux loadable Kernel Module (LKM) called Containerized Storage Class Memory, or CSCM, that presents SCM for application isolation and ease of portability. We performed evaluation using microbenchmarks, STREAMS, and Redis, a popular in-memory data structure store, and found our CSCM driver has near the same memory throughput for SCM applications as a non-containerized application running on a host and much higher throughput than persistent in-memory applications accessing SCM through Docker Storage or Volumes.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MARWAN AYASH whose telephone number is (571)270-1179. The examiner can normally be reached 9a-530p M-R.
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/Marwan Ayash/ - Examiner - Art Unit 2133
/ROCIO DEL MAR PEREZ-VELEZ/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2133
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