Patent ID: 7710972

Claim:
A method implemented by a network processor, the method comprising: identifying, by the network processor, information about a table by referencing a first portion of a table descriptor associated with the table; identifying, by the network processor, two or more locations of the table in memory by referencing a second portion of the table descriptor, wherein one location of the table is discontinuous from another location of the table; providing access to the table based on the information and the two or more locations identified in the table descriptor, wherein a format of the table descriptor is shared by a plurality of table descriptors to provide access to a corresponding plurality of tables in the memory; providing information about and locations of the plurality of tables in the corresponding plurality of table descriptors, wherein at least one of the tables is distributed across multiple different memory types; and publishing a set of application programming interfaces (“APIs”) to provide access to the tables based on the table descriptors, wherein the tables comprise lookup tables for Internet Protocol (“IP”) routing or packet classification within a network node and wherein the APIs are shared by a packet classify block and a packet forwarding block to provide access to the tables.