Techniques for non-disruptive configuration changes are provided. A packet is received at a network device, and the packet is buffered in a common pool shared by a first processing pipeline and a second processing pipeline, where the first processing pipeline corresponds to a first policy and the second processing pipeline corresponds to a second policy. A first copy of a packet descriptor for the packet is queued in a first scheduler based on processing the first copy of the packet descriptor with the first processing pipeline. A second copy of the packet descriptor is queued in a second scheduler associated based on processing the second copy of the packet descriptor with the second processing pipeline. Upon determining that the first policy is currently active on the network device, the first copy of the packet descriptor is dequeued from the first scheduler.