Patent ID: 8873388

Claim:
A method, comprising: based on a segmentation offload request issued by a protocol stack for offloading segmentation to a network adaptor of a first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) segment of data to be transmitted: segmenting the first TCP segment of data into multiple TCP segments for transmission, each of the multiple TCP segments having a respective TCP segment header, at least a TCP sequence number in each of the respective TCP segment headers being determined by the network adaptor as a part of the segmentation offload; and initiating transmission of the multiple TCP segments by the network adaptor; based on a request issued by the protocol stack to transmit a second TCP segment having a second TCP segment header, the request to transmit the second TCP segment not being a segmentation offload request, determining whether to interleave transmission of the second TCP segment with transmission of the multiple TCP segments; and based on the determining whether to interleave transmission of the second TCP segment with transmission of the multiple TCP segments, causing transmission of the second TCP segment by the network adaptor after a first of the multiple TCP segments has been transmitted by the network adaptor but before a last of the multiple TCP segments has been transmitted by the network adaptor.