Patent ID: 8447884

Claim:
A method for mapping virtual addresses to physical addresses, the method comprising: receiving a packet at a network interface controller within a network device; identifying a logical interface configured to handle the received packet by analyzing at least a portion of the received packet, wherein the logical interface corresponds to one or more applications executing on at least one processing system of the network device; assigning an available physical address to the received packet, wherein the available physical address is associated with the identified logical interface and identifies a buffer location in a buffer memory; retrieving, from a memory of the network interface controller, a virtual address assigned to the physical address in accordance with the identified logical interface; extracting data to be handled by the logical interface from the received packet; storing the extracted data to the buffer location in the buffer memory identified by the assigned physical address; and transmitting the retrieved virtual address to the at least one processing system, wherein the data stored in the buffer location can be accessed by the processing system using the corresponding retrieved virtual address.