One other item for that list is packet-offloading for networking cards. That is, taking the work of checksum calculation, and even the wrapping/unwrapping of d

One other item for that list is packet-offloading for networking cards. That is, taking the work of checksum calculation, and even the wrapping/unwrapping of data (converting from streams to/from packets), and pushing that into the NIC's hardware. I was also thinking about including the work that hard-drive controllers do (like checksumming, and handling 512/4K logical/physical sectors), but the difference there is that, for NIC offload, the kernel has that functionality already, where for hard drives the kernel does not do the work of the hard-drive controller.