remains to be sent a fast path receive operation begins when a frame arrives on the inic cpd 30 for a connection on which no outstanding receive operation is already in progress as shown in fig7 when such a frame is received by the inic cpd 30 some or all of the received frame depending on the frame size is forwarded 140 to the miniport driver 70 which in turn sends 142 a tcp_offload_frame_data frame containing the forwarded information to the host stack 44 the host stack 44 will in turn communicate with the upper layer interface which may be a tdi interface for microsoft systems calling a receive handler registered by the upper layer or application the amount of data in the received message frame may be indicated to that host application at this point which may be termed an indicated length that frame may also indicate the size of the data for the entire received message so that a destination for that data can be earmarked within the host such as with a scatter gather list a total message length that may be specified in an initial frame header is termed an available length for example a netbios message denotes the size of the data in the netbios header which can optionally be processed by the inic cpd 30 and passed to the upper layer interface for earmarking a final host destination in which to place the message data alternatively the host stack 44 can process an initial netbios header and learn how much more data is expected for the netbios request in cases for which a total message is size is unknown a fictitious indication of large message length can be communicated to the upper layer interface causing.