TECHNIQUES FOR ARCHITECTURE-INDEPENDENT DYNAMIC FLOW LEARNING IN A PACKET FORWARDER

Exemplary techniques for architecture-independent dynamic flow learning in a packet forwarder are described. A packet forwarder includes a plurality of forwarding threads and a plurality of provisioning threads, and can implement three functional blocks to learn new flows-an admission control block, a forwarding database building block, and a notification path block. An admission control module can control the ability for forwarding threads to place flow operation requests in operation queues. Provisioning threads independently manage particular operation queues, and can update corresponding portions of a control database and a forwarding database. Flow operation notifications can be managed through notification queues, which can be drained back into the operation queues for the provisioning threads to later process. The packet forwarder thus can benefit from a highly-parallel, highly-efficient software-based approach to flow learning operations that does not require specialized hardware support.