Patent ID: 7924840

Claim:
A method of operating network interface circuitry, wherein the network interface circuitry is configured to couple a host computer to a network to facilitate communication over the network between the host computer and a peer, the method comprising: by the network interface circuitry, receiving data from the peer via the network; and processing the received data, including: where there is a layer-2 classification rule associated with characteristics of the received data, automatically applying the classification rule to the received data to determine an indication of a control block corresponding to a guest operating system operating within a virtual environment on the host computer; using the determined indication of the control block to determine, from information in the control block, an indication of a destination queue associated with the host computer and corresponding to the guest operating system; and demultiplexing the received layer-2 packets according to the determined indications of the destination queues associated with the host computer.