[mycall]

> have an OS try to muck about with encodings

Hardware encode/decode often requires DMA capabilities. There are many optimizations that kernel mode can bring.

[john_reel]

x86 has string instructions that do not require DMA. Nobody needs to hardware accelerate string decoding and encoding though...

[pdonis]

> Hardware encode/decode

Of text?

[braveo]

but is it webscale?