Patent ID: 7953876

Claim:
A method of preparing application data for transmission from a host application across a TCP network, the method comprising: writing a transmit descriptor in a host memory queue, said transmit descriptor indicating the application data to be transmitted by the host application; establishing a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection for a Virtual Interface (VI) connection; notifying a host bus adapter of the transmit descriptor in the host memory queue, said host bus adapter coupled to a host executing said host application, said host including said host memory queue; initiating a VI context loading task by finding appropriate VI context information from a host bus adapter VI context cache or loading appropriate VI context information from host memory VI context buffers, the VI context information including state information for the TCP and VI connections; reading the transmit descriptor from the host memory queue and writing into a host bus adapter VI context cache after the VI context information is loaded; scheduling a Virtual Interface packet for transmission in a TCP packet in response to transferring the application data from a host memory buffer to a host bus adapter packet buffer in accordance with the transmit descriptor; and transmitting the application data in the TCP packet from said host bus adapter across the TCP network.