Certain aspects of a method and system for transparent transmission
control protocol (TCP) offload are disclosed. Aspects of a method may
include collecting TCP segments in a network interface card (NIC)
processor without transferring state information to a host system. The
collected TCP segments may be buffered in a coalescer. The coalescer may
verify that the network flow associated with the collected TCP segments
has an entry in a flow lookup table (FLT). When the FLT is full, the
coalescer may close a current entry and assign the network flow to the
available entry. The coalescer may also update information in the FLT.
When an event occurs that terminates the collection of TCP segments, the
coalescer may generate a single aggregated TCP segment based on the
collected TCP segments. The aggregated TCP segment and state information
may be communicated to the host system for processing.