DISTRIBUTED PROTOCOL FRAMEWORK

摘要

A distributed computing system (6) having a distributed protocol stack (12). In a system including one or more general purpose computers or other application processors (8) for running applications (22), the distributed protocol stack (12) off-loads communication or other I/O processing from the application processor (8) to dedicated I/O processors (9) using a STREAMS environment thereby enhancing the performance/capacity of the system. The distributed protocol stack (12) is formed of a STREAMS stack top (15) and a stack bottom (16) so that together the stack top (15) and stack bottom (16) comprise a full stack (12) functionally equivalent to a non-distributed stack running on an application processor (8). Both the application processors (8) and the I/O processors (9) together appear to execute the full protocol stack (12), but the application processor (8) only executes the stack top (15) while the I/O processor only executes the stack bottom (16).