Direct data placement and message reassembly

This invention relates to direct placement of bulk data into application buffers and reassembly of messages. A direct data placement implementation for a data reassembly process. Data within a protocol data unit is placed directly in preassigned application buffers. The network interface card has buffer space into which message headers, segment headers and indicators of escaped data and size of escaped data are placed. A single buffer can contain this information for a complete PDU (or message) and is handed over to enable the next process to run on a per message basis.