Patent ID: 9712544
Date: 2017-07-18
CPC Classifications: G06F,H04L

Claim:
1. A method comprising: running a first network security application on a first central processing unit (CPU) of a plurality of CPUs of a host processor of a network security appliance; running a second network security application on a second CPU of the plurality of CPUs; defining, by a network interface controller (NIC) of the network security appliance, a first direct cache access (DCA) control for a first I/O device queue of a plurality of I/O device queues of the NIC corresponding to the first CPU, wherein the first DCA control specifies a first set of one or more portions of an Internet Protocol (IP) packet queued on the first I/O device queue that are to be copied to a cache of the first CPU responsive to transfer of the packet queued on the first I/O device queue to a host memory of the host processor; defining, by the NIC, a second DCA control for a second I/O device queue of the plurality of I/O device queues corresponding to the second CPU, wherein the second DCA control specifies a second set of one or more portions of an IP packet queued on the second I/O device queue that are to be copied to a cache of the second CPU responsive to transfer of the packet queued on the second I/O device queue to the host memory; receiving, by the NIC, an incoming IP packet; identifying, by the NIC, boundaries of portions of the incoming IP packet by parsing the incoming IP packet; and facilitating parallel processing of appropriate portions of the incoming IP packet by the first network security application and the second network security application by: