[jsnell]

For example various kinds of hardware TCP offload, like:

1. Handing the NIC a single blob of data (> MSS) in a single operation, and having the NIC do the segmentation into multiple packets.

2. Having the NIC detect multiple exactly consecutive TCP packets on the same flow, and merging them to a single receive operation.

Hardware offload is impossible to do for UDP, since neither the NIC or OS can assume anything about the payload semantics.