Virtual memory interface

Abstract

The embodiments that are described herein provide random access to individual data storage locations of a group of buffers, which may be scattered in the memory. These embodiments provide a virtual memory interface that applies virtual addresses in a flat memory linear addressing space as indices into the physical memory addresses that are ordered into a sequence in accordance with the group of buffers. In this way, these embodiments enable a device (e.g., a processor) to directly and sequentially access all of the scattered physical memory locations of a fragmented data item, such as a packet, without having to perform any memory segmentation or paging processes. In some embodiments, these accesses include both read and write accesses to the scattered data storage locations.