I'm trying to understand Linux Network subsystem and after reading some documents, my broad level understanding for Rx Path is as follows: 1: Card receives the packet. 2: Assume everything is fine, the card DMAs the frame for the driver to process it further. 3: Driver allocate an skb buffer, adjusts the headroom. 4: Fills the buffer and pass it to the Network layer. Now in step 4 above, driver passes this packet to the network layer by calling netif_receive_skb() which may return NET_RX_DROP (packet was dropped), but most (I checked some of the network driver code) of the network drivers do not do this check. Hence, Q1: Shouldn't drivers be doing that ? Q2: Suppose the Card keeps pushing the frames at very high rate (10 Gig adapters are already in the market and maybe in near future we might have even faster ethernet adapters) then how the driver and the networking stack will handle such rapid frames arrivals? Will NAPI, interrupt coalescing be enough ? I'm referring kernel version 2.6.31 -Amit