Patent ID: 7912082

Claim:
A system comprising: one or more processing units; a network interface unit coupled to the one or more processing units, wherein the network interface includes: a network port for connection to a network, wherein the network port includes a shared media access control (MAC) unit; a virtual interface coupled to the network port, wherein the virtual interface is configured as a network segment and includes: a plurality of processing unit resources each associated with a respective one of the one or more processing units; wherein each of the processing unit resources includes: an I/O interface unit coupled to a respective one of the one or more processing units via an I/O interconnect; an independent programmable virtual MAC unit that is programmably configured by the respective one of the one or more processing units; a receive datapath and a transmit datapath that are coupled between and shared by the plurality of processing unit resources and the network port, wherein the receive datapath includes a packet filter unit configured to determine, based upon a destination MAC address included within each packet, if any of the one or more processing units is a target for each packet; an internal loopback path, wherein a packet originating from a given processing unit of the plurality of processing units and transmitted to the network via the network port is also sent via the internal loopback path to the receive datapath; wherein the virtual interface is configured to distribute an available communication bandwidth of the network port between the one or more processing units.