Patent ID: 8611255

Claim:
A method for performing a flushing process at a port of a network switch, wherein the flushing process comprises at least two operations being a flooding operation and an operation of relearning MAC addresses; the method comprises making said two operations independent of each other, starting the operation of relearning MAC addresses before termination of the flooding operation, the method further comprises starting an operation of forwarding packets to the relearned MAC addresses before termination of the flooding operation, performing said flooding operation and said relearning operation respectively with reference to two artificially provided different instances of said port being flushed, thereby making said two operations independent and preventing flooding of the packets to the relearned MAC addresses while the flooding operation is in progress, and wherein for performing the flushing process at said port of a network switch comprising a plurality of ports, the method comprises assigning said two different instances to each port of said plurality, one instance being a main instance, while another being an additional instance, in case the flushing process is required for a specific port, declaring a “flushing” status only for one of the instances of said specific port; performing the flooding operation using the instance being in the “flushing” status; and performing the operations of relearning and the operation of forwarding using the instance not being in the “flushing” status.