1. A non-transitory machine-readable medium having executable instructions to cause one or more processing units to perform a method to broadcast configuration data from a control plane of a network element to a plurality of hardware forwarding engines of the network element, the method comprising: receiving, by a central processing unit of the network element, the configuration data to broadcast to the plurality of hardware forwarding engines; writing the configuration data to a broadcast log; transmitting a signal to one or more co-processors that the configuration data is available to be read, wherein each of the plurality of hardware forwarding engines corresponds to one of the one or more co-processors, and each of the co-processors reads the data by, receiving the signal that the configuration data is ready to be read from the broadcast log, determining a broadcast log entry for the configuration data for that co-processor, and reading the configuration data from the broadcast log entry via a direct memory access in memory that stores the broadcast log and the corresponding one of the plurality of hardware forwarding engines uses the configuration data to determine how that hardware forwarding engine processes network traffic.