Patent ID: 7620749

Claim:
A method for performing a direct memory access block move with descriptor prefetch in a direct memory access device, the method comprising: responsive to space being available in a descriptor prefetch buffer within the direct memory access device, fetching, using one read/write transaction, a block of sequential physical memory into the descriptor prefetch buffer to speculatively prefetch a plurality of direct memory access descriptors, stored in a linked list architecture; checking validity of the speculatively prefetched plurality of direct memory access descriptors in the descriptor prefetch buffer; responsive to a given direct memory access descriptor being non-sequential with respect to a previous direct memory access descriptor within the speculatively prefetched plurality of direct memory access descriptors or being an invalid direct memory access descriptor, marking the given direct memory access descriptor invalid; and processing descriptors from the descriptor prefetch buffer to perform direct memory access block moves according to the descriptors.