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The history of NFE processors sheds light on the tradeoffs involved in designing network stack software.

THE BASE CASE

As a starting point, consider the canonical structure of a common workstation or server before the advent of multicore processors. Ignoring the provenance of the operating-system code, this model springs directly from the quintessential early to mid-1980s computer science department computer, the DEC VAX 11/780 with a 10-megabit Ethernet interface with single-cycle DMA (direct memory more queue: queue.acm.org ACM QUEUE February/March 2009 29