Patent ID: 7245613

Claim:
A method in a channel adapter, the method comprising: coupling a receive bus in the channel adapter to a network, including receiving by the receive bus a data stream from the network, the data stream including bytes of packet data for a data packet; resetting a counter in the channel adapter in response to detecting, in the data stream on the receive bus, a start data packet delimiter for the data packet; incrementing the counter for each received byte of the data packet as the corresponding byte is received on the receive bus; initiating packet validation in the channel adapter in response to the counter reaching a prescribed threshold corresponding to reception of an initial header of the data packet, the initiating step including determining whether the initial header includes any errors; and selectively reporting in the channel adapter one of the errors detected in the initial header, upon reception of an end of the data packet, based on a determined absence of a higher-priority error relative to the one error according to a prescribed error reporting order.