Method and apparatus for pre-classifying packets

Abstract

The disclosed embodiments relate to a system that provides an intelligent port infrastructure for communication network devices. This is accomplished by incorporating a highly configurable pre-classifier module into the port infrastructure. This pre-classifier makes it possible to realign packet data to add a configurable number of bytes to the front of the packet, and also to select interesting data from incoming packets for further analysis. The selected data is sent into a configurable classification engine, which generates instructions that specify how to determine associated packet attributes. The packet attributes are then generated based on the instructions, and are forwarded along with the packet to downstream processing units.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A method for processing a packet, comprising:
 receiving a packet from an input port;   selecting data from one or more locations in the packet;   performing a classification operation based on the selected data to generate a classification result including instructions specifying how to generate attributes for the packet;   using the instructions from the classification result to generate attributes for the packet; and   forwarding the attributes along with the packet to facilitate subsequent packet-processing operations.