Techniques for managing ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) resources in heterogeneous systems

摘要

Techniques for managing ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) in a network device/system are provided. In one embodiment, the network device/system can include one or more TCAMs and can execute a TCAM manager for each TCAM. Each TCAM manager can manage allocation of resources of its associated TCAM, as well as manage access to the TCAM by one or more network applications running on the device/system. In this way, the TCAM managers can hide TCAM implementation differences (e.g., different sizes, different capabilities, etc.) from the network applications and thereby enable the applications to interact with the TCAMs in a uniform manner.