TCP gets special treatment?

[Per Hurtig (work)]

Hi,

How differently are TCP packets treated compared to e.g. SCTP packets,
while traversing the FreeBSD network stack (up to and including the
IP-layer when using ipfw)?. I do not assume that the firewall (ipfw)
is explicitly configured to check for established sessions or any TCP
specifics. Are there a lot of TCP-specific optimizations conducted by
lower layers anyways (besides possible checksum offloading)?

BR, Per