A system for facilitating efficient port reconfiguration at a switch is provided. During operation, the system can identify a target port of the switch for reconfiguration based on one or more reconfiguration parameters indicating how a set of logical ports are generated from the target port. The system can disable the target port at the control plane of the switch, which disables features provided to the target port from the control plane. The control plane can provide a set of features supported by the switch at a port-level granularity for facilitating operations of the switch. The system can then configure the forwarding hardware based on the reconfiguration parameters to accommodate the set of logical ports. When the reconfiguration of the target port is complete, the system can enable a respective logical port at the control plane, which enables one or more features for the logical port from the control plane.