Stateless Fibre Channel Sequence Acceleration for Fibre Channel Traffic Over Ethernet

A network interface device for performing transmit sequence offloading in a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) operation, the network interface comprising:

• an FCoE encapsulation module that receives a single request for one or more data sequences, the FCoE encapsulation module being operable to encapsulate the one or more data sequences to generate a plurality of FCoE frames;
• a Fibre Channel sequence offload interface operable to generate a single transmit request descriptor for transmitting the plurality of FCoE frames associated with the one or more data sequences, wherein the transmit sequence request descriptor comprises a sequence size of the one or more data sequences;
• and
• a Fibre Channel transmit sequence offload module operable to separate the one or more data sequences into a plurality of data frames and operable to modify each of the plurality of data frames in response to information in the transmit sequence request descriptor, the Fibre Channel transmit sequence offload module in communication with the Fibre Channel sequence offload interface.

A method for performing transmit sequence offloading in a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) device, the network interface comprising:

• receiving a single request for one or more data sequences;
• separating the one or more data sequences into a plurality of data frames;
• generating a plurality of FCoE frames by encapsulating the plurality of data frames;
• generating a single transmit request descriptor for transmitting the plurality of FCoE frames associated with the one or more data sequences, wherein the transmit sequence request descriptor comprises a sequence size of the one or more data sequences;
• and
• modifying each of the plurality of FCoE frames according to information in the transmit sequence request descriptor.

A Network Interface Card (NIC) comprising:

• a processing unit comprising an offload engine, the processing unit operable to:
• receive a single request for one or more data sequences;
• separate the one or more data sequences into a plurality of data frames;
• generate a plurality of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) frames by encapsulating the plurality of data frames;
• generate a single transmit request descriptor for transmitting the plurality of FCoE frames associated with the at least one Fibre Channel sequence, wherein the transmit sequence request descriptor comprises a sequence size of the one or more data sequences;
• and
• modify each of the plurality of FCoE frames according to information in the transmit sequence request descriptor.