The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 06, 2010
Filed:
Jan. 22, 2007
Clive M. Philbrick, San Jose, CA (US);
Laurence B. Boucher, Saratoga, CA (US);
Stephen E. J. Blightman, San Jose, CA (US);
Peter K. Craft, San Francisco, CA (US);
David A. Higgen, Saratoga, CA (US);
Daryl D. Starr, Milpitas, CA (US);
Clive M. Philbrick, San Jose, CA (US);
Laurence B. Boucher, Saratoga, CA (US);
Stephen E. J. Blightman, San Jose, CA (US);
Peter K. Craft, San Francisco, CA (US);
David A. Higgen, Saratoga, CA (US);
Daryl D. Starr, Milpitas, CA (US);
Alacritech, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
A network interface device has a fast-path ACK generating and transmitting mechanism. ACKs are generated using a finite state machine (FSM). The FSM retrieves a template header and fills in TCP and IP fields in the template. The FSM is not a stack, but rather fills in the TCP and IP fields without performing transport layer processing and network layer processing sequentially as separate tasks. The filled-in template is placed into a buffer and a pointer to the buffer is pushed onto a high-priority transmit queue. Pointers for ordinary data packets are pushed onto a low-priority transmit queue. A transmit sequencer outputs a packet by popping a transmit queue, obtaining a pointer, and causing information pointed to by the pointer to be output from the network interface device as a packet. The sequencer pops the high-priority queue in preference to the low-priority queue, thereby accelerating ACK generation and transmission.