The invention relates to a control forwarding technology on network equipment and discloses a
protocol stack routing table maintaining method. The problem that in the prior art, the
processing capacity of whole equipment is lowered caused by the fact that a large amount of
system internal storage is consumed because of a maintaining mode of a
protocol stack routing table is solved. In the method, if a
protocol stack module does not inquire
route information corresponding to a message locally, the target
IP address of the message is used as a key word, routing information is subscribed appointing a
route management module, when the routing information of the
route management module subscribed on the protocol stack module changes, the changed routing information is issued to the protocol stack module, when the routing information which is not subscribed by the protocol stack module changes, issuing is not carried out, so that the protocol stack module does not need to maintain all
routing table items, and accordingly
system internal storage occupying is lowered, and in addition, the invention further discloses a corresponding maintaining device which is suitable for control forwarding of the network equipment.