Range slots for deterministic finite automatons in a regular expression accelerator

A method comprising:

• loading an object file into a memory associated with a regular expression (regex) accelerator, wherein the object file includes information concerning a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) graph and range information indicative of whether any of a set of transitions along an edge associated with the DFA graph can be captured by a single transition, wherein the range information for the single transition is stored in a range slot in the memory associated with the regex accelerator, and wherein the range information comprises a slot label for the range slot and a comparison bit indicative of a less than equal operation between the portion of the payload being processed and the slot label;
• the regex accelerator receiving a payload for processing;
• during processing of the payload, in response to the comparison bit specifying the less than equal operation between the portion of the payload being processed and the slot label, instead of executing the set of transitions along the edge associated with the DFA graph, executing the single transition along the edge associated with the DFA graph;
• and
• upon a successful match between the payload and at least one of the set of regular expression patterns, indicating a match.

A method comprising:

• loading an object file into a memory associated with a regular expression (regex) accelerator, wherein the object file includes information concerning a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) graph and a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) graph and range information indicative of whether any of a set of transitions along an edge associated with the DFA graph can be captured by a single transition, wherein the range information for the single transition is stored in a range slot in the memory associated with the regex accelerator, and wherein the range information comprises a slot label for the range slot and a comparison bit indicative of a less than equal operation between the portion of the payload being processed and the slot label;
• the regex accelerator receiving a payload for processing;
• and
• during processing of the payload, in response to the comparison bit specifying the less than equal operation between the portion of the payload being processed and the slot label, instead of executing the set of transitions along the edge associated with the DFA graph, executing the single transition along the edge associated with the DFA graph.