Patent ID: 11924108
Assignee: CISCO TECHNOLOGY, INC.
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 10:
11. A method performed in a packet switching device, the packet switching device comprising: a processor; a plurality of network interfaces operative to send and receive packets; a packet forwarding mechanism comprising: a forwarding information base; and one or more network processors operative to receive and forward packets from the plurality of network interfaces; an adjunct packet processing offload platform internal to the packet switching device, the adjunct packet processing offload platform comprising: one or more processors; and a memory, wherein the adjunct packet processing offload platform is a compute platform adjunct to the packet forwarding mechanism; the method comprising: forwarding, by the packet forwarding mechanism, select packets received on one or more of the network interfaces to the adjunct packet processing offload platform based on one or more attributes of the select packets; maintaining, by the adjunct packet processing offload platform, a forwarding data structure comprising packet forwarding information mapping respective IP addresses to corresponding egress forwarding values, each forwarding value associated with a corresponding one of the plurality of network interfaces; receiving, by the adjunct packet processing offload platform, the select packets from the packet forwarding mechanism; offload-packet processing, by the adjunct packet processing offload platform, the select packets resulting in offload-processed packets including an egress forwarding value, wherein the offload-packet processing includes: performing a forwarding lookup operation in the forwarding data structure resulting in an identification of the egress forwarding value that effectively identifies an egress interface of the plurality of network interfaces; and sending, by the adjunct packet processing offload platform, the offload-processed packets and the egress forwarding value to the packet forwarding mechanism.