Message processing method and forwarding device

Abstract

The embodiment of the invention provides a message processing method and a forwarding device. The forwarding device comprises a special processor, a universal processor, a special memorizer and a universal memorizer. When the forwarding device processes a message, the special processor obtains first matching information, looks for a first table in the special memorizer so as to determine search information corresponding to the first matching information, and further sends the message and the search information to the universal processor, and then the universal processor looks for a second table in the universal memorizer with the search information as the index so as to determine a corresponding instruction set and process the message. In this way, when the forwarding device processes the message, the found matching information of the flow tables and the found instruction set are stored in the special memorizer and the universal memorizer respectively, and the flow tables can be stored by reasonably utilizing storage space of the special memorizer of the forwarding device.

Description

technical field [0001] Embodiments of the present invention relate to the communication field, and more specifically, relate to a message processing method and a forwarding device. Background technique [0002] A forwarding device consists of hardware and software, such as figure 1 shown. [0003] The hardware usually includes multiple ports, a forwarding engine and a forwarding table storage module. The ports are exposed on the outside of the device and are used to connect network cables, and the inside of the ports are connected to the forwarding engine through wires. The forwarding engine is composed of one or more chips. It receives packets from various ports, searches forwarding tables according to the destination address of the packets, and sends the packets out through the port according to the egress port recorded in the matching forwarding entry. The forwarding table storage module is usually a dedicated memory, such as content addressable memory (Content Address...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

The instruction of another entry may contain multiple actions, and the length is relatively large.

At this time, if the flow table is not defined according to the maximum length of the entry, some entries cannot be written into the flow table; if the flow table is defined according to the maximum length of the entry, a large amount of flow table storage space will be wasted

Due to the reasons of power consumption and cost, the space of dedicated memory is generally not too large, and once the equipment is produced, it cannot be expanded. The serious waste as mentioned above is unacceptable

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