Intel Corporation

Nir Haber

Eli Sorin

Ben-Zion Friedman

Eliel Louzoun

Lior Aloni

Disclosed is a mechanism for maintaining a single lookup table entry for symmetric/bidirectional flows. Multiple recipes are stored for each flow. A recipe is employed to select address information from an incoming packet header based on the packet's direction. The address information and an index are employed to generate a lookup key to find the single lookup table entry with the pertinent switching information. The recipe further indicates action pointers in the lookup table entry that are specific to direction. The action pointers point to an address in an action table that contains instructions for actions that are applied to the packet during switching based on the packet's direction.

Single lookup entry for symmetric flows

Technologies for flexible tree-based lookups include an network device that receives a network packet. The network device classifies the network packet to determine a packet type and extracts multiple fields from the network packet to generate a field vector. The fields are selected based on the packet type. The field vector includes words that are associated with the fields. The network device builds a tree representation of the field vector. The tree representation includes a leaf node corresponding to each word of the field vector and one or more root nodes. The network device executes an iterative lookup over the tree representation and, if matching, may perform an action associated with the iterative lookup. To execute the lookup, the network device may determine whether a search key for each node exactly matches a search rule, up to a root node. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

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Haifa, Israel

Nir Haber