Patent ID: 7739403

Claim:
A method comprising: managing state information within a primary control unit included within a device, wherein the state information comprises information representing a current state of one or more consumers included within the device, wherein managing the state information comprises (i) managing the state information within a temporally-ordered data structure, (ii) utilizing, for each of the consumers, a commit proposal and a commit marker pair within the temporally-ordered data structure to identify a portion of the state information for each of the consumers and (iii) setting, for each of the consumers, the corresponding one of the commit markers to identify a most recent object of the temporally-ordered data structure that has been communicated to and for which an acknowledgement has been received from the respective one of the consumers; receiving, with the primary control unit, a change to the state information; prior to communicating the change to the consumers of the state information included within the device, communicating to a standby control unit included within the device the change performed by the primary control unit to the state information to synchronize the state information between the primary and standby control units, wherein communicating the change to the standby control unit comprises (i) replicating the temporally-ordered data structure within the standby control unit and (ii) replicating the commit proposal and the commit marker to the standby control unit, wherein replicating the temporally-ordered data structure comprises communicating a portion of the replicated temporally-ordered data structure that is bounded by the replicated commit proposal and the replicated commit marker to the consumer from the standby control unit in the event the primary control unit fails; after synchronizing the state information between the primary and standby control units, communicating, with the primary control unit, the change to at least one of the consumers to update consumer state information maintained within the at least one of the consumers in accordance with the portion of state information identified by the respective one of the commit proposal and commit marker pairs of the temporally-ordered data structure, wherein at least one of the consumers comprises a forwarding component of the device; issuing a communication from the primary control unit to cause the standby control unit to set the replicated commit proposal to identify a most recent object of the replicated temporally-ordered data structure that has not been acknowledged by the consumer; and issuing another communication from the primary control unit to cause the standby control unit to set the replicated commit marker to identify a most recent object of the replicated temporally-ordered data structure that has been communicated to the consumer and for which an acknowledgement has been received from the consumer.