In the K2H device, Packet Accelerator (PA) is one of the main components of the network coprocessor peripheral. The PA is a firmware that works with the Gigabit Ethernet switch subsystem to perform packet processing operations such as packet header classification, checksum generation, and multi-queue routing. On the other hand, the NDK software supports both Layer 3 and Layer 4 checksums calculation. If this can be offloaded to the K2H’s PA, then the CPU processing power can be saved.

Current NDK design abstracts at NIMU layer. NDK is device independent without the knowledge of underlying hardware capabilities. In the receiving path, the PA does the packet classification at Layer 2 then handles the packets to the NDK stack. In the transmitting path, the NDK forms the packets and pass them to the NIMU driver. All the Layer 3 and Layer 4 are handled by the NDK software, the checksum calculation can’t be offloaded to the PA firmware.