Apparatus and method for aligning data transferred via dma using a

Abstract

An apparatus and method for transferring data via DMA in data processing system from a host system to a transmission network. The transferred data is in longword format in which each longword consists of four bytes. Within a longword, valid bytes intended for transmission are contiguous. The adapter or I/O device includes a packet memory and a FIFO circuit interposed between the host system and packet memory to allow for differences in access speed of a host memory and the packet memory. The FIFO circuit contains four discrete FIFO circuits that are separately addressable for writing the bytes of each longword received from the host memory for storage in the FIFO circuit. The received longword is applied to a barrel shifter which aligns the first valid byte in the received longword with the one of the four discrete FIFO circuits containing a first available storage location at a current FIFO longword address. A FIFO control circuit receives information describing the number of valid bytes in the received longword and generates a control signal to control the barrel shifter and FIFO address signals to cause the valid bytes of the received longword to be stored in contiguous byte positions in the FIFO circuit commencing with the first available storage location.