Allocation of Shared Reserve Memory to Queues in a Network Device

A network device includes one or more ports, a packet processor, and a memory management circuit. The one or more ports are to communicate packets over a network. The packet processor is to process the packets using a plurality of queues. The memory management circuit is to maintain a shared buffer in a memory and adaptively allocate memory resources from the shared buffer to the queues, to maintain in the memory, in addition to the shared buffer, a shared-reserve memory pool for use by a defined subset of the queues, to identify in the subset a queue that (i) requires additional memory resources, (ii) is not eligible for additional allocation from the shared buffer, and (iii) meets an eligibility condition for the shared-reserve memory pool, and to allocate memory resources to the identified queue from the shared-reserve memory pool.