Linux - eBPF

A gateway to discover all the basics of eBPF, including a listing of the main related projects and of community resources.

In-depth documentation about most features and aspects of eBPF.

Index for BPF-related documentation coming with the Linux kernel.

eBPF specification (somewhat outdated; information should still be valid, but not exhaustive).

Frequently Asked Questions on the decisions behind the BPF infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions about contributing to eBPF development.

Manual page about the bpf() system call, used to manage BPF programs and maps from userspace.

Manual page about using BPF with tc, including example commands and samples of code.

Description of the in-kernel helper functions forming the BPF standard library.

Summary of eBPF syntax and operation codes.

Work in progress, contributions welcome.

Emails from David Miller to the xdp-newbies mailing list:bpf.h and you...Contextually speaking...BPF Verifier Overview

An accessible introduction providing context, history, and details about the functioning of eBPF.

An eBPF Overview - Blog series by Adrian Ratiu, covering many aspects of the eBPF infrastructure:Part 1: IntroductionPart 2: Machine & Bytecode

They have a few posts about eBPF:Part 1: Past, Present, and FuturePart 2: Syscall and Map Types

About BPF C and bcc Python helpers, from bcc repository.

A set of slides covering all the basics about eBPF and XDP (mostly for network processing).

An introduction mostly covering the tracing aspects.

An introduction mostly covering the tracing aspects.

An introduction mostly covering the tracing aspects, first part with flame graphs.

Also introduces IO Visor project.

Presentation by the author of eBPF.

A blog post from 2014 on the development of BPF and demonstrating what can be done with it, using an example of stateful socket filtering by attaching an eBPF program to a socket.

Greg Marsden made some documentation about eBPF:A Tour of Program Types - A description of all existing hooks for BPF program types, and of their interest.BPF helper functions - A review of the kernel functions that can be called from within eBPF programs.Communicating with Userspace - How BPF communicates with userspace - BPF maps, perf events, bpf_…

A blog post covering the basics of eBPF as well as code samples in Go on how to build and load a minimal eBPF program into the kernel.

A short paper describing the fundamentals of eBPF and how to get started with writing eBPF programs.

Different blog posts about networking use cases and low-level aspects of eBPF.

An in-depth collection of information around examples of performance analysis tools using eBPF. Contains also a section at the end of the page about other resources.

A set of live-coding talks and the accompanying code examples, introducing eBPF programming using a variety of libraries and program types.

Linux networking internals, with a part about eBPF.

A detailed introduction to tracing with eBPF, from listing the available trace points to running bpftrace programs.

Kprobes, uprobes, ftrace.

Systemtap, Kernelshark, trace-cmd, LTTng, perf-tool, ftrace, hist-trigger, perf, function tracer, tracepoint, kprobe/uprobe, and more.

A very accessible introduction to XDP, providing sample code to show how to process packets.

All XDP details in a technical paper: The eXpress Data Path: Fast Programmable Packet Processing in the Operating System Kernel, by Toke Høiland-Jørgensen, Jesper Dangaard Brouer, Daniel Borkmann, John Fastabend, Tom Herbert, David Ahern and David Miller, all being essential eBPF and XDP contributors.

Guide from the Cilium project.

The first presentation about XDP.

Contains some benchmark results obtained with the mlx4 driver.

Jesper Dangaard Brouer has several sets of slides describing the internals of XDP:XDP − eXpress Data Path, Intro and future use-cases - Linux Kernel's fight against DPDK. Future plans (as of this writing) for XDP and comparison with DPDK.Network Performance Workshop - Additional hints about XDP internals and expected evolution.[XDP –…

About packet filtering on Linux, DDoS protection, packet processing in the kernel, kernel bypass, XDP and eBPF.

Cloudflare's blog post talking about their move to using XDP for packet filtering.

Kernel documentation on the AF_XDP address family.

A blog post by Cilium on the motivations behind eBPF and bpfilter, with a couple examples and links to other projects using eBPF and bpfilter.

Slides from a talk by Quentin Monnet with a background on eBPF and comparing bpfilter to iptables.

Kernel documentation about BTF, explaining how to use it.

A description of the work done with BTF to provide debugging information for BPF programs.

A community-authored newsletter enriched with useful code illustrations and hands-on examples.

The original paper about (classic) BPF.

Usage of BPF bytecode with the xt_bpf module for iptables.

Hardware offload for eBPF with TC or XDP (Linux kernel 4.9+), introduced by Netronome.

An update on the topic above.

An eBPF CPU written for FPGAs.

Computational Storage simulation (QEMU) platform with FUSE LFS filesystem for Zoned Namespaces NVMe SSDs using uBPF for compute kernel offloading, all in userspace.

Delilah is a Computational Storage Processor (CSP) built for eBPF offload to storage devices.

Many incremental steps to start using bcc and eBPF, mostly centered on tracing and monitoring.

Comes with bcc, but targets the Python bits across seventeen "lessons".

Helps generate minimal or advanced templates to bootstrap your own applications (kernel side and user space management for maps and programs) with features like CO-RE, global variables, and ring buffer.

A thorough walk-through of how to write eBPF programs, first using only bpf() syscall, and then libbpf library, with reproducible code examples.

Involves the use of several BPF tools for tracing.

Troubleshooting ping requests and replies with perf and bcc programs.

Operated by Netronome: some tutorials for network-related eBPF use cases, including an eBPF Offload Starting Guide.

First edition of a workshop to get started with XDP.

Second edition, with new contents.

A progressive (three levels of difficulty) tutorial to learn how to process packets with XDP.

A step-by-step walkthrough to integrate tracing capabilities in your C++ applications with the LLVM libraries.

A simple guide to build basic firewalls with TC and XDP.

A detailed explanation of methods used to capture DNS requests at the socket filter layer.

Start with eBPF basics and progress to advanced topics using 20+ hands-on tutorials and examples. Covers performance, networking, and security with libbpf and CO-RE. Available in Chinese and English.

A step-by-step guide to benchmarking both the client and kernel eBPF code written in Rust.

Newsletter about all the ways to loop and iterate in eBPF.

A step-by-step guide how eBPF can observe encrypted network traffic.

A step-by-step guide how eBPF can observe Redis communication between client and server.

A step-by-step guide on how to implement a transparent proxy using eBPF.

Learn how eBPF can infer custom load-balancing for services listening on the same port, through the SO_REUSEPORT TCP option.

Learn how you can unit test your eBPF programs using libbpf.

Learn how eBPF can speed-up local socket communication up to 30%.

A step-by-step guide to write an appliation continuous profiler leveraging the eBPF instrumentation, with a complete project as a reference.

An introductory guide to writing image-based eBPF gadgets and sharing them via OCI registries.

An introductory guide to writing image-based eBPF gadgets and performing post-processing with WASM.

In the kernel tree: some sample eBPF programs.

In the kernel tree: Linux BPF selftests, with many eBPF programs.

Jesper Dangaard Brouer's prototype-kernel repository contains some additional examples that can be compiled outside of kernel infrastructure.

Some networking programs to attach to the TC interface.

Provides basic but complete examples of eBPF applications also compatible with hardware offload.

Examples coming along with the bcc tools, mostly about tracing.

These tools themselves can be seen as example use cases for BPF programs, mostly for tracing and monitoring. bcc tools have been packaged for some Linux distributions.

A heavily commented sample demonstrating how to encapsulate & decapsulate MPLS within IP. The code is commented for those new to BPF development.

A collection of compiled (as ELF object files) samples gathered from several projects, primarily intended to serve as test cases for user space verifiers.

A fully documented and tested example of an eBPF probe that logs all force-kills and prints them out in user-space.

Example programs for using RedBPF to write eBPF programs in Rust.

Program that uses XDP/TC-eBPF to provide statefull firewalling and socket redirection.

Framework and set of tools - One way to handle BPF programs, in particular for tracing and monitoring. Also includes some utilities that may help inspect maps or programs on the system.

Another alternative to C, and even to most of the Python code used in bcc.

Package containing tools for network management on Linux. In particular, it contains tc, used to manage eBPF filters and actions, and ip, used to manage XDP programs. Most of the code related to BPF is in lib/bpf.c.

The development tree, synchronised with net-next.

Contains several tools used in eBPF workflows. Snapshots of the latest versions for Ubuntu/Debian can be retrieved from here.clang is used to compile C to eBPF object file under the ELF format (clang v3.7.1+). The BPF backend was added with this commit.llvm-objdump is used to dump the content of an object file in human-readable format, possibly with the initial C source code (llvm-objdump v4.0+).llvm-mc is used to compile from LLVM inter…

A C library used for handling BPF objects (programs and maps), and manipulating ELF object files containing them. It is shipped with the kernel and mirrored on GitHub.

Scaffolding for BPF application development with libbpf and BPF CO-RE.

Pure-Go library to read, modify and load eBPF programs and attach them to various hooks in the Linux kernel.

eBPF library for Go, powered by libbpf.

Go bindings for BCC for creating eBPF programs.

A pure Rust library for writing, loading, and managing eBPF objects, with a focus on developer experience and operability. It supports writing eBPF programs in Rust and distributing library code over crates.io to share it between eBPF programs. Aya does not depend on libbpf.

Templates for writing BPF applications in Aya that can be used with cargo generate.

Rust library for writing Linux security policies using eBPF.

A pure Zig framework for writing cross platform eBPF programs, powered by libbpf and Zig toolchain.

A compilation framework and runtime library to build, distribute, dynamically load, and run CO-RE eBPF applications in multiple languages and WebAssembly. It supports writing eBPF kernel code only (to build simple CO-RE libbpf eBPF applications), writing the kernel part in both BCC and libbpf styles, and writing userspace in multiple languages in a WASM module and distributing it with simple JSON data or WASM OCI images. The runtime is based on libbpf only and provides CO-RE to BCC-style eBPF p…

A pure Rust library for managing eBPF programs, designed for security use cases. The featureset is more limited than other libraries but emphasizes stability across a wide range of kernels and backwards-compatible compile-once-run-most-places.

Also some other tools in the kernel tree, under linux/tools/net/ for versions earlier than 4.15, or linux/tools/bpf/ after that:bpftool - A generic utility that can be used to interact with eBPF programs and maps from userspace,…

Written in C. Contains an interpreter, a JIT compiler for x86_64 architecture, an assembler and a disassembler.

With support for FreeBSD kernel, FreeBSD user space, Linux kernel, Linux user space and macOS user space. Used for the VALE software switch's BPF extension module.

Written in Rust. Interpreter for Linux, macOS and Windows, and JIT-compiler for x86_64 under Linux.

A user space verifier for eBPF using an abstract interpretation layer, with support for loops.

Written in Go. A tool for tracing execution of Go programs by attaching eBPF to uprobes.

A tracing profiler that aims to make eBPF uprobe-based debugging easier to use. This is done by displaying traces in a UI next to the source code and allowing interactive drilldown analysis.

This project is a work-in-progress that allows using existing eBPF toolchains and APIs familiar in the Linux ecosystem to be used on top of Windows.

To easily test XDP. Less useful now that generic XDP (driver-independant, mostly for testing) exists.

P4 has some interactions with eBPF:P4 on the Edge - P4 with eBPF to create high-performance programmable switches.OvS Orbit episode (#11), called P4 on the Edge - Related to the former item. Audio interview of John Fastabend by Ben Pfaff, one of the core maintainers of Open vSwitch.[P4, EBPF and Linux TC Offload](https://open-nfp.org/m/documents/Open_NFP_P4_EBPF_Linux_TC_Off…

project (GitHub repository) is a technology relying on BPF and XDP to provide "fast in-kernel networking and security policy enforcement for containers based on eBPF programs generated on the fly". Many presentations available (with overlap):Cilium: Networking & Security for Containers with BPF & XDP - Also featuring a load balancer use case[Cilium: Networking & Security for Cont…

Open vSwitch (OvS), and its related project Open Virtual Network (OVN, an open source network virtualization solution) are considering using eBPF at various level:Offloading OVS Flow Processing using eBPFCoupling the Flexibility of OVN with the Efficiency of IOVisor

A layer 4 load-balancer based on XDP, open-sourced by Facebook.

Protection against DDoS with XDP at Cloudflare.

Protection against DDoS with XDP at Facebook.

Common Ethernet Driver Framework for faster network I/O, a technology initiated by Mellanox.

Suricata, an open source intrusion detection system, relies on eBPF components for its "capture bypass" features:"eBPF and XDP" section of Suricata documentationSEPTun-Mark-II - Extreme Performance Tuning guide - Mark II.[A blog post introducing the feature](https://www.stamus-netwo…

Calico is an open source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico's eBPF data plane delivers a low latency, high throughput data plane with a rich network security policy model.Enabling eBPF data plane with Calico

Use eBPF to speed up your Service Mesh. Merbridge replaces iptables rules with eBPF to intercept traffic. It also combines msg_redirect to reduce latency with a shortened datapath between sidecars and services.

An open-source C++ library for capturing, parsing and crafting network packets. It features a C++ interface for creating AF_XDP sockets, making it easy to send and receive packets through them.

A high performance and lightweight captive portal solution for wireless networks. It leverages eBPF for traffic control and deep packet inspection capabilities, with plans to gradually replace nftables firewall functionality with eBPF-based solutions.

A proof-of-concept IPX implementation for Linux using eBPF.

Helps with measuring power consumption for servers and uses eBPF programs for in-kernel aggregation of data.

Observability for Kubernetes using eBPF. Features include protocol tracing, application profiling, and support for distributed bpftrace deployments.

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform specially designed for distributed systems with microservices, cloud-native and container-based (Kubernetes) architectures. SkyWalking Rover is an eBPF-based profiler and metrics collector for C, C++, Golang, and Rust applications.

eBPF based always-on continuous profiler for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time.

Sampling profiler and tracer for Ruby.

Network, service and security observability for Kubernetes using eBPF.

Instant Kubernetes service dependency map generated by eBPF, right to a Grafana instance.

Instant observability for cloud-native and AI applications based on eBPF.

Coroot is an open-source APM & Observability tool, a DataDog and NewRelic alternative.

Kyanos is an eBPF-based network issue analysis tool that enables you to capture network requests, such as HTTP, Redis, and MySQL requests.

A cloud-native runtime security project used as a Kubernetes threat detection engine.

A security monitoring tool. It depends on SysinternalsEBPF.

Red Canary has started to incorporate eBPF to their Linux security sensor.

A runtime security and forensics tool for Linux which uses eBPF technology to trace the system and applications at runtime, and analyze collected events to detect suspicious behavioral patterns.

A set of BPF programs that gather security relevant event data from the Linux kernel. The BPF programs are combined into a single ELF file from which individual probes can be selectively loaded, depending on the running operating system and kernel version.

An eBPF driven security tool for locking and auditing Linux machines.

Kubernetes-aware, eBPF-based security observability and runtime enforcement.

Trace syscalls from user-space functions, by using eBPF.

Extended detection and response (XDR) with eBPF-powered firewall and proxy, to protect your Linux servers.

BpfJailer is an eBPF-based process jailing system that provides mandatory access control (MAC) for Linux.

An eBPF-based security agent written entirely in Rust using the Aya library and built on LSM (Linux Security Module) BPF hooks.

sched_ext schedulers and tools.

Gthulhu optimizes cloud-native workloads using the Linux Scheduler Extension for different application scenarios.

A small but flexible open source dynamic tracer for Linux, with features similar to the bcc tools, but with a simpler language inspired by awk and DTrace.

A tool for tracing with its own high-level tracing language. It is flexible enough to be envisioned as a Linux replacement for DTrace and SystemTap.bpftrace Cheat Sheet - Summary and cheat sheet for programming in bpftrace. Contains information about syntax, probe types, variables and functions.

A kubectl plug-in for executing bpftrace programs in a Kubernetes cluster.

A collection tools and framework for data collection and system inspection on Kubernetes clusters and Linux hosts using eBPF.

Framework for running BPF programs with rules on Linux as a daemon. Container aware.

A distinct BPF daemon, trying to leverage the flexibility of the bcc tools to trace and debug remote targets, and in particular devices running with Android.

A Linux shell environment for using tracing tools on Android with BPFd.

System daemon to compile and load eBPF programs into the kernel, and forward program output to socket for metric aggregation.

Considers using eBPF.

An in-kernel solution based on XDP for 5G UPF.

Tooling and framework to write eBPF code in Rust efficiently.

A web interface to explore system's maps and programs.

A TUI (terminal user interface) application for real time monitoring of eBPF programs.

An eBPF Manager for Linux and Kubernetes. Includes a built-in program loader that supports program cooperation for XDP and TC programs, as well as deployment of eBPF programs from OCI images.

A process-aware, eBPF-based tcpdump-like tool.

A TUI for sniffing network traffic using eBPF on Linux.

A series of posts around the introduction into BPF with a focus to an offensive setting, and also how its misuse can be detected. Posts include discussions on the rootkit capabilities of eBPF, or on which tracing type is needed for different use cases.

Blog post about how BPF can help detection and blocking fileless malware.

Talk about an eBPF rootkit and how the capabilities of eBPF could be abused. The rootkit was also the object of a talk at Defcon, eBPF, I thought we were friends !.

A rootkit that leverages multiple eBPF features to implement offensive security techniques.

An utility to statically analyze eBPF bytecode or monitor suspicious eBPF activity at runtime. It was specifically designed to detect ebpfkit.

A collection of malicious eBPF programs that make use of eBPF's ability to read and write user data in between the usermode program and the kernel.

A Linux eBPF rootkit with a backdoor, C2, library injection, execution hijacking, persistence and stealth capabilities.

with linux/include/uapi/bpf.h: definitions related to eBPF, to be used respectively in the kernel and to interface with userspace programs.

with linux/include/uapi/filter.h: information used to run the BPF programs themselves.

This directory contains most of BPF-related code. In particular, those files are worth of interest:syscall.c - Different operations permitted by the system call, such as program loading or map management.core.c - BPF interpreter.[verifier.c](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux…

Functions and eBPF helpers related to networking (TC, XDP etc.); also contains the code to migrate cBPF bytecode to eBPF (all cBPF programs are translated to eBPF in recent kernels).

Functions and eBPF helpers related to tracing and monitoring (kprobes, tracepoints, etc.).

and in particular in files act_bpf.c (action) and cls_bpf.c (filter): code related to BPF actions and filters with TC.

contains the function dev_change_xdp_fd() that is called through a Netlink command to hook a XDP program to a device, after is has been loaded into the kernel from user space. This function in turns uses a callback from the relevant driver.

BPF patches land in this tree. It is regularly merged into net-next, which is itself merged for each release to Linus' tree.

About contributions to BPF.

Mailing list for Linux kernel networking stack development. All patches are sent there for review and inclusion.

A mailing list specially dedicated to XDP programming (both for architecture or for asking for help).

BPF is at the heart of the project, and is regularly discussed on the mailing list.

A GitHub repository with notes and ideas regarding the future evolutions of XDP.