I've always been told that the routing table is a control plane concept. You build this table, collect the routes, the way they were learned, their metrics, and so on.
You then use this information to build a more forwarding-suitable table, the forwarding information base (FIB) which is a CEF concept. This table is then what's actually used to perform route lookups and is optimized for forwarding data.
However, this doesn't work the same if CEF is disabled. If CEF is disabled, process-switching takes place. With process-switching, there is no FIB, so the device actually performs a route lookup in the routing table this time, right?
So with process-switching, doesn't this make the routing table also a part of the data plane?
Note: I understand that CEF should not be disabled, I just want to know this from a theoretical perspective.