US Patent 7275121 System and method for hardware assisted resource sharing

A system and method for managing access to a shared resource employs mutually exclusive flags. The flags enable arbitration between all applications requesting the use of the shared resource and ensure that each application has exclusive and continuous use of the shared resource. The preferred embodiment uses hardware to realize the flags and the flag arbitrating means. In one embodiment, the applications control and observe the flags through read/write registers. Alternative embodiments provide a unique read/write register for each application using the shared resource.