Patent attributes
Some embodiments of the invention provide a method for providing flow processing offload (FPO) for a host computer at a physical network interface card (pNIC) connected to the host computer. A set of compute nodes executing on the host computer are each associated with a set of interfaces that are each assigned a locally-unique virtual port identifier (VPID) by a flow processing and action generator. The pNIC includes a set of interfaces that are assigned physical port identifiers (PPIDs) by the pNIC. The method includes receiving a data message at an interface of the pNIC and matching the data message to a stored flow entry that specifies a destination using a VPID. The method also includes identifying, using the VPID, a PPID as a destination of the received data message by performing a lookup in a mapping table storing a set of VPIDs and a corresponding set of PPIDs and forwarding the data message to an interface of the pNIC associated with the identified PPID.
