US Patent 10313495 Compiler and hardware interactions to remove action dependencies in the data plane of a network forwarding element

A method of configuring a forwarding element that includes several data plane message processing stages. The method stores a set of action codes in an instruction memory in the data plane of the forwarding element. Each action code identifies an operation to perform on a field of a message received at the data plane. The method determines action codes required to process each field of the message in each message processing stage. The method configures a data-plane processing unit of the forwarding element to concurrently perform a group of the action codes in the same data plane processing stage when (i) the action codes are the same and (ii) operate on the same field of the message.