Patent ID: 7496689

Claim:
A system, comprising: (a) fast-path receive circuitry that is in control of a first plurality of TCP/IP connections, a first TCP/IP packet associated with one of the first plurality of TCP/IP connections being received onto the fast-path circuitry from a network, the fast-path receive circuitry comprising: an SRAM that stores a control block (CB) for each TCP/IP connection of a first set of the first plurality of TCP/IP connections; a DRAM that stores a CB for each TCP/IP connection of a second set of the first plurality of TCP/IP connections, the DRAM storing a CB associated with the first TCP/IP packet received onto the fast-path receive circuitry; a content addressable memory (CAM); and a first processor that executes a receive state machine, the first processor obtaining from the CAM information to determine whether the CB associated with the first TCP/IP packet is stored in the SRAM or is stored in the DRAM, the first processor using the information obtained from the CAM to access the CB; wherein the fast-path receive circuitry uses a plurality of hash buckets to identify control blocks (CBs) associated with a plurality of incoming TCP/IP packets, some of the plurality of hash buckets being cached in the SRAM, others of the hash buckets being stored in DRAM; and (b) a processor that executes a protocol processing stack, the protocol processing stack being in control of a second plurality of TCP/IP connections, wherein TCP/IP packets associated with the second plurality of TCP/IP connections are received onto the fast-path circuitry from the network, the protocol processing stack performing TCP protocol processing on the TCP/IP packets associated with the second plurality of TCP/IP connections, and wherein other TCP/IP packets associated with the first plurality of TCP/IP connections are received onto the fast-path circuitry from the network, the protocol stack performing substantially no TCP protocol processing on the other TCP/IP packets associated with the second plurality of TCP/IP connections.