Determining actions to be immediately performed on a network packet with an application specific integrated circuit

A non-transitory machine readable storage medium having stored thereon machine readable instructions to cause a computer processor to:

• fetch an action from an action set accumulated from multiple forwarding tables of a network switch, wherein the action set includes a set of actions in a pipeline to be performed on a first packet;
• in response to a networking Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) in the network switch, determining that the fetched action is not an output action to be performed immediately on the first packet, apply the fetched action to the first packet;
• in response to the networking ASIC determining that the fetched action is an output action to be performed immediately on the first packet, generate a second packet based on the first packet, wherein the output action specifies a physical or virtual port for outputting the first packet;
• output one of the first and second packets through the specified physical or virtual port before performing actions remaining in the action set on the outputted packet;
• and
• return the other one of the first and second packets for further processing, which involves performing the actions remaining in the action set and accumulating actions from additional forwarding tables.

A network switch comprising:

• an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC);
• a processing resource;
• and
• a memory resource storing machine readable instructions to cause the processing resource to:
• accumulate an action set for a first packet received by the switch;
• fetch an action from the action set;
• determine, with the ASIC, whether the fetched action is an output action to be performed immediately on the first packet, wherein the output action specifies a physical or virtual port for outputting the first packet;
• in response to determining that the fetched action is an output action to be performed immediately, generate, by the ASIC, a second packet based on the first packet;
• output one of the first and second packets through the specified physical or virtual port before performing actions remaining in the action set on the outputted packet;
• and
• return the other one of the first and second packets for further processing, which involves performing the actions remaining in the action set and accumulating actions from additional forwarding tables.