Patent attributes
High-speed processing of packets to, and from, a virtualization environment can be provided while utilizing segmentation offload and other such functionality of commodity hardware. Virtualization information can be added to extension portions of protocol headers, for example, such that the payload portion is unchanged and, when physical address information is added to a frame, a frame can be processed using commodity hardware. In some embodiments, the virtualization information can be hashed and added to the payload or stream at, or relative to, various segmentation boundaries, such that the virtualization or additional header information will only be added to a subset of the packets once segmented, thereby reducing the necessary overhead. Further, the hashing of the information can allow for reconstruction of the virtualization information upon desegmentation even in the event of packet loss.