Patent ID: 7804769

Claim:
A method for distributing state information within a multi-chassis router comprising a first local routing engine and a second local routing engine, wherein the second local routing engine acts as a standby routing engine for the first local routing engine, the multi-chassis router further comprising a third routing engine configured as a master routing engine for the multi-chassis router, the method comprising: storing state information within a hierarchically-ordered and temporally-linked data structure within the first local routing engine; receiving updates to the state information with the first local routing engine of the multi-chassis router from the third routing engine of the multi-chassis router; communicating the updates from the first local routing engine to the second local routing engine, wherein communicating the updates to the second local routing engine comprises replicating at least a portion of the hierarchically-ordered and temporally-linked data structure to the second local routing engine; and after communicating the updates from the first local routing engine to the second local routing engine, communicating the updates from the first local routing engine to one or more consumers of the state information, wherein the one or more consumers receive and utilize state information from the first local routing engine, and wherein at least one of the consumers comprises a forwarding component for the first local routing engine; wherein communicating the updates from the first local routing engine to one or more of the consumers of the state information comprises: setting a commit proposal to identify a most recent object of the hierarchically-ordered and temporally-linked data structure for the updates for which an acknowledgement request has been sent to the one or more consumers; and setting a commit marker to identify a most recent object of the hierarchically-ordered and temporally-linked data structure for the updates that have been communicated to the one of the consumers and for which an acknowledgement has been received from the one of the consumers.