Abstract: A system and method for interfacing TCP Offload Engines (TOE) into an operating system to improve system performance and reduce CPU utilization. The system and method places an interposed filter before the generic user space socket library near the top of the TCP stack to intercept at the earliest possible layer a user application network socket request. The interposed filter determines whether an I/O request is targeted for a generic network adapter or a full TOE network adapter. For I/O requests that are targeted to a full TOE network adapter, the request is formatted to meet the requirements of the full TOE driver and sent directly to that driver, bypassing the operating system's generic user space socket library and socket driver in kernel space. This system and method takes full advantage of the capabilities offered by TOE hardware.

Abstract: A method for detecting whether a socket request is directed to a TOE adapter or a generic network adapter is provided. Specifically a set of driver entry points are inserted into a system trap table of an operating system whereby the driver entry points are pointers to driver socket function that replace the original socket functions. The driver socket functions intercept and snoop all socket requests including I/O requests to and from sockets. If the driver socket function determines that the structure of the socket requests contains an encoded pointer, the socket request is passed to TOE hardware for processing. If, however, the driver socket function determines that the structure of the socket requests lacks an embedded pointer, the socket request is passed to generic hardware for processing.