Disclosure is made of a shared memory switch and methods and system for controlling such. The shared memory switch may allocate cells in a storage array to respective use cases, the use cases including input buffering, output queuing, free cell allocation, and retry buffering. A set of data packets may be stored in the cells allocated to output queuing, wherein each cell allocated to output queuing stores a respective data packet of the set of data packets. A subset of the set of data packets may be transmitted to a destination external to the shared memory switch. The cells storing the subset of data packets may be reallocated to the retry buffering use case, wherein cells allocated to retry buffering use case are a retry buffer.

Examples describe a manner of scheduling packet segment fetches at a rate that is based on one or more of: a packet drop indication, packet drop rate, incast level, operation of queues in SAF or VCT mode, or fabric congestion level. Headers of packets can be fetched faster than payload or body portions of packets and processed prior to queueing of all body portions. In the event a header is identified as droppable, fetching of the associated body portions can be halted and any body portion that is queued can be discarded. Fetch overspeed can be applied for packet headers or body portions associated with packet headers that are approved for egress.

A packet processing method includes: obtaining, at a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, a first fragmented data frame included in a first data frame; buffering the first fragmented data frame into a first queue; obtaining, at the MAC layer, a second fragmented data frame included in a second data frame; buffering the second fragmented data frame into a second queue; sending the first fragmented data frame to a forwarding processing module; obtaining first forwarding information using the forwarding processing module; sending the second fragmented data frame to the forwarding processing module after sending the first fragmented data frame to the forwarding processing module; and obtaining second forwarding information.

A network interface controller (NIC) capable of efficient management of non-idempotent operations is provided. The NIC can be equipped with a network interface, storage management logic block, and an operation management logic block. During operation, the network interface can receive a request for an operation from a remote device. The storage management logic block can store, in a local data structure, outcome of operations executed by the NIC. The operation management logic block can determine whether the NIC has previously executed the operation. If the NIC has previously executed the operation, the operation management logic block can obtain an outcome of the operation from the data structure and generate a response comprising the obtained outcome for responding to the request.

Systems and methods are provided for passing data amongst a plurality of switches having a plurality of links attached between the plurality of switches. At a switch, a plurality of load signals are received from a plurality of neighboring switches. Each of the plurality of load signals are made up of a set of values indicative of a load at each of the plurality of neighboring switches providing the load signal. Each value within the set of values provides an indication for each link of the plurality of links attached thereto as to whether the link is busy or quiet. Based upon the plurality of load signals, an output link for routing a received packet is selected, and the received packet is routed via the selected output link.

Systems and methods for supporting memory page fault handling for network devices are disclosed. In one implementation, a processing device may receive, at a network interface device of a host computer system, an incoming packet from a network. The processing device may also select a first buffer from a plurality of buffers associated with a receiving queue of the network interface device. The processing device may attempt to store the incoming packet at the first buffer of the plurality of buffers. Responsive to receiving a notification that attempting to store the incoming packet at the first buffer encountered a page fault, the processing device may assign the first buffer to a wait queue of the network interface device. The processing device may further store the incoming packet at a second buffer of the plurality of buffers associated with the receiving queue.

A network interface controller (NIC) capable of hybrid message matching is provided. The NIC can be equipped with a host interface, a hardware endpoint, and an endpoint management logic block. The host interface can couple the NIC to a host device. The hardware endpoint can facilitate a point of communication for an application running on the host device. The endpoint management logic block can maintain a list for storing a message associated with an endpoint represented by the hardware endpoint. The endpoint management logic block can then determine whether the utilization of the list is higher than a threshold. If the utilization is higher than the threshold, the endpoint management logic block can set a state of the endpoint to indicate that the endpoint is software managed. The NIC thus can transfer the control of the endpoint from the hardware endpoint to a software process of the host device.

Data-driven intelligent networking systems and methods are provided. The system can accommodate dynamic traffic with fast, effective congestion control. The system can maintain state information of individual packet flows, which can be set up or released dynamically based on injected data. Each flow can be provided with a flow-specific input queue upon arriving at a switch. Packets of a respective flow can be acknowledged after reaching the egress point of the network, and the acknowledgement packets can be sent back to the ingress point of the flow along the same data path. As a result, each switch can obtain state information of each flow and perform flow control on a per-flow basis.

Methods and systems are provided to facilitate network egress fairness between applications. At an egress port of a network, an arbitrator can provide fairness-based traffic shaping to data associated with applications. The desired fairness-based traffic shaping can be provided based on bandwidth, traffic classes, or other parameters. Consequently, the egress link's bandwidth can be allocated with fairness among the applications.

A switch is provided, which can receive a data communication at an edge of a network. The network may be made up of a plurality of switches. The switch may generate a flow channel based upon an identified source and destination for the data communication. The data communication can be routed across the plurality of switches based on minimizing a number of hops between a subset of the plurality of switches and in accordance with the flow channel.