Cisco Technology, Inc.

Motorola Corporation

Alon Ratinsky

Rami Zemach

Doron Shoham

Sarig Livne

John Joseph Williams, Jr

Eyal Oren

Moshe Voloshin

David Belz

Udi Barel

Boaz Shahar

John J Williams

Disclosed are, inter alia, methods, apparatus, data structures, computer-readable media, and mechanisms, for matching items with resources, such as, but not limited to packet processing contexts, output links, memory, storage, specialized hardware or software, compute cycles, or any other entity. One implementation includes means for maintaining distribution groups of items, means for maintaining differently aged resources queues, and means for matching resources identified as being at the head of the plurality of differently aged resources queues and as being primarily and secondarily associated with said distribution groups based on a set of predetermined criteria. For example, even though processing contexts can be shared among different distribution groups of packets, by giving preference to assigning recently used processing contexts for processing packets of a same distribution group, it is more likely that the processing instructions are already in the memory of this processing context, and therefore, processing will not be delayed until such instructions are retrieved into memory.

Assigning resources to items such as processing contexts for processing packets

A virtual address storage system, which may be of particular used in generating fragmented packets, is implemented using a linked list of data segments. Multiple storage segments linked together in a linked list data structure are maintained to represent a virtual contiguous block of storage to be accessed based on a virtual address. Virtual address to corresponding data segment pointer associations are maintained for identifying a data segment corresponding to a particular address within the address space. In response to an identified address in the address space, a particular closest dynamic recently used association is identified and used to traverse to the desired data segment (e.g. rather than traversing from the beginning of the linked list), and one of the dynamic recently used associations is updated. A packet can be stored in this address space along with newly generated packet headers and tails for the multiple fragmented packets.

Virtual address storage which may be of particular use in generating fragmented packets

Methods and apparatus are disclosed for maintaining netflow statistics using an associative memory to identify and maintain netflows. A lookup operation is performed on a set of associative memory entries to produce an associative memory result directly or after a subsequent memory read operation. In response to the associative memory result corresponding to a not found condition, an entry is added to the set of associative memory entries. Otherwise, a statistics entry in the set of statistics is updated based on the associative memory result. In one implementation, the associative memory is programmed with a set of permanent netflow entries and a set of dynamic or nonpermanent netflow entries, which are maintained in the form of a queue or ring buffer. In one embodiment, when the number of dynamic entries exceeds a threshold value, one or more of the dynamic entries and their corresponding statistics values are flushed.

Method and apparatus for maintaining netflow statistics using an associative memory to identify and maintain netflows

In a Plug and Play environment different kinds of EEPROMs can be used having different access protocols without having to add an additional pin to the EEPROM to indicate its type. The first type of EEPROM has a code which indicates the first type stored on a predetermined address whereas the second type of EEPROM having a different read protocol has another code which indicates the second type stored on a consecutive address. When the Plug and Play controller accesses the EEPROM for a read either the code 1 or code 2 is outputted whereby the appropriate read protocol is identified.

Method for determining a type of a serial EEPROM and plug and play

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Hadera, Israel

Alon Ratinsky