How eBPF Turns Linux into a Programmable Kernel

4 years ago thenewstack.io

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The Linux kernel could see a radical shift in how it operates, given the full promise of the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), argued Daniel Borkmann, Linux kernel engineer for Cilium, in a technical session during the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU virtual conference. In effect, eBPF provides a way for developers to add their own programs into the kernel itself. Borkmann even predicts that the Linux kernel may morph into an “eBPF-powered microkernel,” a tiny core kernel with minimal built-in capabilities.

With eBPF, developers write the code in a subset of C, which is compiled into BPF bytecode to run on the BPF virtual machine.

Another project, the BPF Compiler Collection (BCC), is developing a language wrapper for Python, to make it easier to code into BPF.

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