1. A non-transitory machine-readable medium having executable instructions to cause one or more processing units to perform a method to broadcast 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 data to broadcast to the plurality of hardware forwarding engines; writing the data to a broadcast log; transmitting a signal to one or more co-processors that the 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 data is ready to be read from the broadcast log, determining a broadcast log entry for the data for that co-processor, and reading the data from the broadcast log entry via a direct memory access in memory that stores the broadcast log and the plurality of hardware forwarding engines use the data to process network traffic.