Patent ID: 7688825

Claim:
A switching device comprising: a plurality of ports, each of the ports comprising a cache having one or more filtering entries, each of the ports operable to receive a frame, the frame including a payload and a header specifying addressing information, to determine whether the addressing information corresponds to one of the filtering entries, to drop the frame if the addressing information corresponds to one of the filtering entries, and to forward the frame to a switching core if the addressing information does not correspond to one of the filtering entries; and the switching core comprising: a frame buffer operable to store the frames forwarded from the ports; a forwarding database operable to maintain a plurality of routing entries, each entry indicating either one of or both an outbound one of the ports and a drop condition; and a controller operable, for each of the frames in the frame buffer, to identify the addressing information from the header of the frame stored in the frame buffer, to identify one of the routing entries in the forwarding database corresponding to the addressing information, if the corresponding routing entry indicates an outbound one of the ports, to forward the frame to the indicated outbound one of the ports, and if the corresponding routing entry indicates a drop condition, to drop the frame and to communicate a cache update indicating the drop condition to a port of the plurality of ports that received the frame.