A forwarding system comprises a identification engine, a hardware forwarding engine configured to process an ingressing packet, a software forwarding engine configured to process the ingressing packet, and a selection engine. The selection engine is configured to select one of the hardware forwarding engine or the software forwarding engine to process the ingressing packet. The selection is based on at least one of an indication of resource availability or a classification of the ingressing packet based on a priority of a flow as determined by the identification engine. In some embodiments, the selection engine selects different forwarding engines to process different packets of a same flow based on changes in resource availability or classification of the ingressing packet.