Patent ID: 7668165
Filing Date: 2010-02-23
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method, comprising: buffering in an inbound buffer packet header and payload data corresponding to a plurality of inbound transmission control protocol (TCP) packets received at a destination machine; performing TCP input processing of the packet header and payload data that is buffered in the inbound buffer via a multi-threaded hardware engine, wherein multiple hardware-arbitrated threads are concurrently executed by the multi-threaded hardware engine to process the plurality of inbound TCP packets; performing a direct memory access (DMA) to concurrently transfer payload data buffered in the inbound buffer to a host memory while performing TCP input processing via the multi-threaded hardware engine; determining an existence of a TCP connection; generating TCP connection context data corresponding to the TCP connection; storing the TCP connection context data in the host memory; maintaining a cache in which selected TCP connection context data is cached; retrieving TCP connection context data for a given packet from one of the host memory and the cache; loading the retrieved TCP connection context data into a working register; and processing the TCP connection context data via the multi-threaded hardware engine to perform TCP input processing.