Received Data

Device errors can result in corrupt data being placed in receive buffers. This corruption is indistinguishable from corruption occurring beyond the domain of the device, for example within a network. Typically, existing software will already be in place to handle such corruption through, for example, integrity checks at the transport layer of a protocol stack or within the application using the device.

If the received data is not going to be subjected to an integrity check at a higher layer, as in the case of a disk driver, it can be integrity-checked within the driver itself. However, such low level integrity checking can cause the greatest degradation to system performance. By not performing such checks at device level the results are, at worst, application failure or file corruption; it is not likely to cause a total system crash.