The life of a data frame has become pretty complicated. Along the way it may pass through one or more layers of virtualization, one or more layers of network-sp

The life of a data frame has become pretty complicated. Along the way it may pass through one or more layers of virtualization, one or more layers of network-specific mangling like iptables doing filtering and NAT, and a combo of the two in OS-based virtualized networks connecting VMs and containers both intra- and inter-host. Pushing more of the stack into hardware is probably a good idea for single-tenant datacenters that can deploy a lot of e.g. Redis appliances, but those of us just renting capacity in the cloud are going to suffer from Amdahl's Law if you can only accelerate the part of the system adjacent to real hardware NICs.