IOMan: An I/O Management Method Supporting Multi-OS Remote Boot and Running

To reduce the cost of users using and maintaining computer systems, based on transparence computing, an I/O management method, IOMan, is presented, which works on a LAN environment. IOMan only uses software solution to setup a disk access redirection mechanism which needn't modify the boot mechanism of commodity operating systems such as Windows, and also doesn't affect the other I/O operations, to support multi-OS remote boot and applications running in LAN. IOMan is constructed as client/server architecture, including two parts: I/O client and I/O server. I/O client runs on the client, and I/O server works on the server. I/O client redefines the processing program of BIOS interrupt accessing the disk, and creates a virtual local disk, to send I/O requests to I/O server. I/O server responses I/O requests from the clients and accesses the virtual disk files stored on the server, and then sends the data to the clients in the form of sectors.