A low-level logical partitioning function associates partitions, partitionable entities, and location codes. Partitionable entities are hardware components, not necessarily individually replaceable. The location code reflects the physical topology of the system packaging. It is preferably a string of concatenated elements, each element representing a device in a hierarchical level of devices which may contain other devices. A respective location code is likewise associated with each of multiple physical indicators. The location code of partitionable entities allocated to a partition is compared with the indicator's location code to determine whether a process executing within a partition can access the indicator. Preferably, each partition has a virtual indicator corresponding to a physical indicator, the state of the physical indicator being derived as a function of the states of multiple virtual indicators for multiple partitions.