Patent ID: 7831739

Claim:
In a virtualized computer system running one or more virtual machines on virtualization software, a computer-implemented method of transmitting a network frame from one of the virtual machines using a hardware network interface device, the method comprising: determining a length of a first part of the network frame consisting of the first part and a remaining part, the length of the first part being less than a length of the network frame; copying only the first part to a transmit buffer which is selected from a plurality of transmit buffers associated with pre-translated mappings from guest physical address to hypervisor virtual address to machine address; copying only the first part of the network frame corresponding to the determined length to the transmit buffers; obtaining a first machine address of the transmit buffer addresses corresponding to first guest physical addresses of the copied, first part of the network frame based upon the pre-translated mappings; from the guest physical addresses to the machine addresses; and obtaining a second machine address of the remaining part addresses corresponding to second guest physical addresses of a second part of the network frame that is not copied to the transmit buffers, and wherein; and transmitting separately the first and the remaining parts of the network frame by direct memory access using the first and the second machine addresses, respectively.