Patent 7376789 was granted and assigned to Intel on May, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Apparatus, systems, methods, and articles may operate to restrict an order of processing of frames associated with a task context stored in at least one context cache memory location. The order of processing may be restricted by selectively locking the context for exclusive use by a selected lane in a multi-lane serial-attached small computer system interface (SAS) hardware protocol engine while the selected lane processes a selected one of the frames.