In exemplary embodiments of the present invention, a router determines whether or not to establish a stateful routing session based on the suitability of one or more candidate return path interfaces. This determination is typically made at the time a first packet for a new session arrives at the router on a given ingress interface. In some cases, the router may be configured to require that the ingress interface be used for the return path of the session, in which case the router may evaluate whether the ingress interface is suitable for the return path and may drop the session if the ingress interface is deemed by the router to be unsuitable for the return path. In other cases, the router may be configured to not require that the ingress interface be used for the return path, in which case the router may evaluate whether at least one interface is suitable for the return path and drop the session if no interface is deemed by the router to be suitable for the return path.

A switch architecture enables ports to stash packets in unused buffers on other ports, exploiting excess internal bandwidth that may exist, for example, in a tiled switch. This architecture leverages unused port buffer memory to improve features such as congestion handling and error recovery.

Methods and systems are described for programming a substitution of ingress replication buffering for egress replication buffering after identifying egress buffer errors (such as overflow) for multicast traffic. A network element is configured to identify which ports drop packets by monitoring egress buffers and/or multicast traffic in real time. A hardware forwarding engine provides feedback to a control plane processor of the network element to adapt and selectively reprogram multicast ingress replication, temporarily, for certain egress ports that may have, e.g., egress buffer errors or risk of issues due to high network traffic. Using virtual output queues in ingress buffers may reduce risk of egress port congestion, as egress buffers have more limited resources than ingress buffers; however, relying solely on ingress replication for multicast traffic may hinder unicast traffic. Ingress buffer replication of multicast traffic may be used selectively and temporarily.

System and method for supporting scalable representation of switch port status in a high performance computing environment. In accordance with an embodiment, a scalable representation of switch port status can be provided. By adding a scalable representation of switch port status at each switch (both physical and virtual)—instead of getting all switch port changes individually, the scalable representation of switch port status can combine a number of ports that can scale by just using a few bits of information for each port's status.

A system for hot swapping a network switch without disconnecting the network switch connectors is provided. The system disaggregates the switch faceplate network cable connectors from the internal components of the network switch so that the internal switch components may be removed from the switch without disconnecting the switch network cables.

Methods and apparatus for memory allocation and reallocation in networking stack infrastructures. Unlike prior art monolithic networking stacks, the exemplary networking stack architecture described hereinafter includes various components that span multiple domains (both in-kernel, and non-kernel). For example, unlike traditional “socket” based communication, disclosed embodiments can transfer data directly between the kernel and user space domains. A user space networking stack is disclosed that enables extensible, cross-platform-capable, user space control of the networking protocol stack functionality. The user space networking stack facilitates tighter integration between the protocol layers (including TLS) and the application or daemon. Exemplary systems can support multiple networking protocol stack instances (including an in-kernel traditional network stack). Due to this disclosed architecture, physical memory allocations (and deallocations) may be more flexibly implemented.

A disclosed method may include (1) receiving, at a node within a network, an MPLS echo request from an additional node adjacent to the node, (2) determining that a FEC query is included in a FEC stack of the MPLS echo request and then, in response to determining that the FEC query is included in the FEC stack of the MPLS echo request, (3) determining at least one FEC that corresponds to a label included in a label stack of the MPLS echo request, and then (4) notifying the additional node of the FEC that corresponds to the label included in the label stack by sending, to the additional node, an MPLS echo reply that identifies the FEC that corresponds to the label. Various other systems, methods, and computer-readable media are also disclosed.

Embodiments of the apparatus for modifying packet headers relate to a use of bit vectors to allow expansion and collapse of protocol headers within packets for enabling flexible modification. A rewrite engine expands each protocol header into a generic format and applies various commands to modify the generalized protocol header. The rewrite engine maintains a bit vector for the generalized protocol header with each bit in the bit vector representing a byte of the generalized protocol header. A bit marked as 0 in the bit vector corresponds to an invalid byte, while a bit marked as 1 in the bit vector corresponds to a valid byte. The rewrite engine uses the bit vector to remove all the invalid bytes after all commands have been operated on the generalized protocol header to thereby form a new protocol header.

A system for forwarding packets between a first endpoint and a second endpoint, comprising one or more processors; a first network interface for communication with the first endpoint and a second network interface for communication with the second endpoint; and non-transitory memory comprising instructions. The instructions cause the one or more processors to receive a first packet from the first endpoint comprising a first data payload; generate a second packet, comprising the first data payload and an indicator of remaining buffer capacity different from an actual buffer capacity of the system; transmit the second packet to the second endpoint; receive a third packet from the second endpoint comprising a second data payload; generate a fourth packet, comprising the second data payload and an indicator of remaining buffer capacity different from an actual buffer capacity of the system; and transmit the fourth packet to the first endpoint.

An on-chip data packet processing method and corresponding integrated circuit, wherein data packets are received at an ingress port and processed with an on-chip wire-speed engine. The processing comprises adding metadata to the data packets, forwarding the processed data to an on-chip QoS unit, altering the metadata of the data packets and/or providing further metadata to the data packets. The data packets are forwarded from the on-chip QoS unit to an on-chip data consumer. If the data consumer is a processing unit the data packets are processed in a first processing step, redirected from the processing unit to the QoS unit and the step of forwarding the data packets to an on-chip data consumer is repeated.