Patent ID: 8010696

Claim:
A method for conveying information from a forwarding-plane process to a control-plane process, comprising: encoding the information in the forwarding-plane process; passing the encoded information from the forwarding-plane process to an operating system; interpreting the encoded information in the operating system; and reporting the encoded information to the control-plane process, the information being passed from the forwarding-plane process to the control-plane process via an unused field in a kernel buffer of the operating system so that messages need not be passed from the forwarding-plane process to the control-plane process through shared memory; wherein encoding the information in the forwarding-plane process includes: detecting an occurrence of a multicast event; creating an event code, based on the multicast event, at a data-plane process operating at a user level, wherein the event code comprises an encoded version of the multicast event, the data-plane process using a first memory mechanism, the event code representing the multicast event; and passing the event code to a kernel of the operating system; wherein interpreting the encoded information in the operating system includes: via a system-level process, interpreting the event code; and formatting the event code according to a format handled by the control-plane process, the control-plane process operating at the user-level; wherein reporting the encoded information to the control-plane process includes: reporting a formatted event code from the operating system to the control-plane process, the control-plane process using a second memory mechanism, wherein the second memory mechanism is separate from the first memory mechanism.