Patent ID: 7760736

Claim:
A method for Ethernet virtualization using an elastic FIFO memory to facilitate flow of broadcast traffic to a virtual host, the method comprising: receiving a packet that represents unknown traffic on a network, the packet including a header; examining the packet header to ascertain that the packet is a broadcast packet; passing the packet to a store engine; the store engine obtaining a packet buffer from an elastic first-in, first-out (FIFO) memory, wherein the packet buffer is an empty packet-sized block of memory in a local data store; the store engine moving the packet into the packet buffer and submitting the packet buffer to the elastic FIFO memory; an assist engine finding the packet buffer on a named queue of broadcast packets and then determining a connection to the packet and moving the packet from the named queue to a numbered connection queue for that connection; a local engine performing a monitoring procedure to detect both an availability of connection-specific resources and a presence of one or more waiting packets with a known destination connection; when a destination connection with one or more waiting packets and available connection-specific resources are both detected, removing the packet from the local data store; allocating the one or more connection-specific resources required to send the packet to a virtual host memory corresponding to the destination connection; and writing the packet to the virtual host memory.