The present invention provides methods and apparatus for decoupling functional processes, such as network protocol applications and device drivers, from hardware resources through the use of logical resources. Logical resources are created to represent the hardware resources within a computer system and a map is created which associates each logical resource with each hardware resource. Functional processes are associated with the logical resources instead of with the hardware resources such that a functional process may be moved to a different hardware resource simply by changing the map to associate the logical resource associated with the functional process with a different hardware resource.