A method, apparatus, and computer program media for a network device comprises a processor; a forwarding engine comprising a plurality of ports to receive packets of data, wherein the packets comprise control packets each addressed to the processor and comprising a priority code representing one of M priorities; N queues each associated with one or more of the M priorities; a decoder to enqueue each of the control packets to one of the N queues according to the priority code in the control packet and a mapping between the N queues and the M priorities; and a scheduler to pass the control packets from the n queues to the processor according to a priority scheme for the N queues.