US Patent 7590755 Method to offload a network stack

A method to offload a network stack connection is presented. A request, which includes a list of resource requirements from each software layer in the stack, to offload the network stack connection is sent through the stack to the peripheral device. The peripheral device is a second processor that processes the offloaded network stack connection in software, in hardware, or a mixture of hardware and software. The device allocates resources for the list and sends a handle to each of the software layers for communication with the device. The state for each layer is sent to the device that includes state variables that are classified as a constant, a cached variable handled by the CPU, or a delegated variable handled by the device.