1. A method of providing stateful flow of a byte stream having portions across a plurality of related network packets in a packet parsing processor, the method comprising: receiving a network packet having a portion of the byte stream; determining that the network packet is from the plurality of network packets based on header information in the network packet; retrieving a parsing context based on the header information, the parsing context comprising a current parsing state of the byte stream; and performing instruction-driver packet parsing on the first portion responsive to the current parsing state.