Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture (CCIE Professional Development)

Chapter 5. Particle-Based Systems

This chapter covers the following key topics:

• Buffer Management Using Particles

• The Cisco 7200 Series Routers

• Packet Switching on the Cisco 7200 Series Routers

All the packet buffering schemes discussed so far have one thing in common: they carve up pools of various-sized buffers, and then allocate one buffer per packet. These types of buffers often are called contiguous buffers because the entire contents of a packet reside in a single buffer in one contiguous area of memory. Buffers either are sized to accommodate the largest packet possible on an interface or they're sized according to a fixed schedule.

Although contiguous buffers are easy to manipulate, they don't always provide the most efficient use of memory. ...