| CPC G06F 12/0802 (2013.01) [G06F 9/461 (2013.01); G06F 9/4881 (2013.01); G06F 2212/60 (2013.01)] | 22 Claims |

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1. A method comprising:
receiving a network packet into a hardware pipeline of a network device;
parsing and retrieving information from the network packet;
determining, by the hardware pipeline, a packet-processing action to be performed by matching the information to a data structure of a set of flow data structures;
sending, by the hardware pipeline, an action request to a programmable core, the action request being populated with data to trigger the programmable core to execute a hardware thread to perform a job, which is associated with the packet-processing action and that generates contextual data;
retrieving the contextual data updated by the programmable core; and
integrating the contextual data into performing the packet-processing action.
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