Priming Failover of Stateful Offload Adapters

Mechanisms, in a data processing system comprising a first adapter and second adapter, for performing a failover operation from the first adapter to the second adapter are provided. The mechanisms detect that an imminent failure of the first adapter is likely to occur and initiate a failover priming operation in the first adapter and second adapter in response to detecting the imminent failure. The failover priming operation configures ingress and egress buffers of the second adapter to have a similar configuration to ingress and egress buffers of the first adapter. The mechanisms migrate processing of ingress data traffic to the second adapter prior to failure of the first adapter such that the first adapter processes egress data traffic from the data processing system and the second adapter processes ingress data traffic to the data processing system.