CEF-related terms

ccnpninja

Hi,
Can somebody explain to me the differences/similarities between these terms?:
L3 Engine, L3 Forwarding Engine, Control Plane, Forwarding Plane, Fast Switching

kryolla

control plane is management traffic such as routing protocols
forwarding plane is data traffic
fast switching came out after process switching but before CEF its how the router switches traffic frome one interface to the other

EdTheLad

L3 forwarding engine,is the processor that makes the l3 forwarding decision.On a 6500 you have the L3 forwarding engine on the supervisor blade.You can also have the system setup for distributed forwarding, in this case the L3 forwarding engine is on the linecard.

ccnpninja

useful info.
I made a little research on that:
L3 Engine: gathers routing information necessary for the L3 Forwarding Engine.
L3 Forwarding Engine: switches frames in hardware. In case of CEF, FIB stores routing info and Adjacency Table stores L2 next-hop addresses (MAC @)
Control Plane=L3 engine
Forwarding Plane=L3 forwarding engine
Fast Switching: or Route Caching; the predecessor of CEF. First packet is examined by the Route Processor/L3 Engine, subsequent packets of the same flow are switches in hardware.