Patent ID: 8488489

Claim:
A packet switch comprising: two or more switch engines; two or more sets of one or more input/output (I/O) ports, each set of I/O ports connected to and associated with a corresponding switch engine; one or more shared memory devices connected to the two or more switch engines and configured to store: egress task data for two or more sets of one or more egress task queues, each set of egress task queues associated with a corresponding switch engine; and packet data for packets received at the I/O ports and processed by the switch engines, wherein: the two or more switch engines are configured to process packets in parallel; each switch engine performs (i) bridging of received packets using bridging logic local to the switch engine and (ii) scheduling of received packets for transmission using scheduling logic local to the switch engine; the one or more shared memory devices are configured to store a shared bridging table accessed by each switch engine to perform the bridging; and each switch engine is further configured to perform access-control-list (ACL) filtering comprising consulting an ACL table and rendering a decision whether to mirror a received packet.