Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft, and Netflix have founded a new non-profit organization, the eBPF Foundation, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The organization aims to provide a neutral platform for the development of eBPF-related technologies. In addition to enhancing the eBPF subsystem in the Linux kernel, it will also promote projects for broader eBPF applications, such as creating eBPF engines to be embedded in applications and adapting eBPF for the kernels of other operating systems.
eBPF provides a built-in kernel bytecode interpreter that allows the behavior of the system to be changed on-the-fly through user-space loadable handlers, without the need to modify the kernel code. This enables efficient handlers to be added without complicating the system itself. eBPF can be used to create network operation handlers, manage bandwidth, control access, monitor system performance, and perform tracing. Thanks to JIT compilation, bytecode is translated in real-time into machine instructions and executed with the performance of native code. eBPF is utilized in Facebook's load balancer and serves as the foundation for the networking subsystem of the Cilium isolated container platform developed by Google.
Source: opennet.ru
