Patent ID: 8630304

Claim:
A switch comprising: a plurality of ingress ports; a plurality of egress ports; a plurality of reserved pools of buffers in a shared memory, first and second reserved pools of the plurality of reserved pools of buffers reserved for respective first and second egress ports of the plurality of egress ports; a shared pool of buffers in the shared memory, the shared pool of buffers shared by the plurality of egress ports; and pool select logic configured to: i) select a buffer to allocate from the first reserved pool when there is at least one free buffer in the first reserved pool that includes all of those buffers of the switch that are reserved for the first egress port, the buffer in the first reserved pool configured to store data received from any ingress port of the ingress ports that is to be forwarded to the first egress port; and ii) otherwise select a free buffer in the shared pool when there is no free buffer in the first reserved pool to store the data.