operating system 132 in contrast consumer pointer 408 points to the first descriptor in descriptor ring 400 that is owned by hypervisor 112 as depicted in fig4 descriptors owned by hypervisor 112 are shaded as white and the buffer addresses of these descriptors are used by vnic 128 a component of hypervisor 112 to store incoming data from device driver 116 as exemplified by arrow 414 after data is written by vnic 128 into a buffer such as 426 pointed to by a descriptor 39 s buffer address such as address 416 the data will be eventually consumed by guest operating system 132 and afterwards as shown by arrow 418 address 416 will be placed back into free buffer address pool 410 from where it was originally allocated by guest operating system 132 at a prior point in time similarly as shown by arrow 420 free buffer addresses such as address 422 are placed into descriptor ring 400 in order to continually provide vnic 128 with free buffers such as 428 to write data incoming from device driver 116 fig5 provides a flow of further detail relating to the processing of the buffer in step 316 in step 500 hypervisor 112 examines the data in the buffer and in step 502 identifies virtual machine 120 1 as the virtual machine instance that is the intended recipient of the data in step 504 hypervisor 112 hands the data processing responsibility off to vmm 138 a in step 506 vnic 128 as.