Patent Document ID: 8730955
Application ID: 13024923

Base Claim:
1. An apparatus, comprising: a capture system configured to couple to a router, which interacts with a plurality of clients in a network environment, wherein the capture system includes a packet capture module for receiving packets associated with traffic flows involving the clients and stores the packets in a receiver packet memory in the capture system; a network interface module; and an application, wherein the packet capture module operates between the network interface module and the application, and wherein the network interface module and the packet capture module operate on a kernel portion of the capture system that is separate from an application portion of the capture system; wherein: the packet capture module further includes a control memory accessible by the network interface module and by the application; the control memory comprising a head pointer updated by the network interface module, and a tail pointer updated by the application; the head pointer and the tail pointer identify the packets in the receiver packet memory which are unprocessed by the application.

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Claim 3:
3. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein at least some of the packets received from the network interface module are placed in the receiver packet memory, which is accessible by the application via an application interface that represents the receiver packet memory as a file.