Methods and arrangements of data communications are discussed. Embodiments include transformations, code, state machines or other logic to provide data communications. An embodiment may involve receiving from a protocol stack a request for a buffer to hold data. The data may consist of all or part of a payload of a packet. The embodiment may also involve allocating space in a buffer for the data and for a header of a packet. The protocol stack may store the data in a portion of the buffer and hand down the buffer to a network device driver. The embodiment may also involve the network device driver transferring the entire packet from the buffer to a communications adapter in a single direct memory access (DMA) operation.