In one embodiment, to determine what tasks may be offloaded to a peripheral hardware device (e.g., to be performed in hardware on the peripheral device, rather than on the CPU(s) of the host computer), an indication from the at least one peripheral hardware device may be provided, without the peripheral hardware device first being queried to determine the task offload capabilities provided by the peripheral hardware device. In another embodiment, a data packet may be sent to the at least one peripheral device with an indication to the at least one peripheral device to perform at least one task offloading capability on the data packet, without first sending a command to the at least one peripheral device to enable the at least one task offloading capability.