PROGRAMMABLE CORE INTEGRATED WITH HARDWARE PIPELINE OF NETWORK INTERFACE DEVICE

A method includes receiving a network packet into a hardware pipeline of a network device; parsing and retrieving information of the network packet; determining, by the hardware pipeline, a packet-processing action to be performed by matching the information to a data structure of a set of flow data structures; sending, by the hardware pipeline, an action request to a programmable core, the action request being populated with data to trigger the programmable core to execute a hardware thread to perform a job, which is associated with the packet-processing action and that generates contextual data; retrieving the contextual data updated by the programmable core; and integrating the contextual data into performing the packet-processing action.