eBPF

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eBPF
Original author(s)Alexei Starovoitov,
Daniel Borkmann[1][2]
Developer(s)Open source community, Meta, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft, Netflix[1]
Initial release2014; 10 years ago (2014)[3]
RepositoryLinux: git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/
Windows: github.com/Microsoft/ebpf-for-windows/
Written inC
Operating systemLinux, Windows[4]
TypeRuntime system
LicenseLinux: GPL
Windows: MIT License
Websiteebpf.io

eBPF is a technology that can run programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel.[5] It is the successor to the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) filtering mechanism in Linux, and is also used in other parts of the Linux kernel as well.

It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel at

static code analysis and rejects programs which crash, hang or otherwise interfere with the kernel negatively.[7][8]

This validation model differs from

sandboxed environments, where the execution environment is restricted and the runtime has no insight about the program.[9] Examples of programs that are automatically rejected are programs without strong exit guarantees (i.e. for/while loops without exit conditions) and programs dereferencing pointers without safety checks.[10]

Design

Loaded programs which passed the verifier are either

Windows.[4]

History

eBPF was built on top of the Berkeley Packet Filter (cBPF). At the lowest level, it introduced the use of ten 64-bit registers (instead of two 32-bit long registers for cBPF), different jump semantics, a call instruction and corresponding register passing convention, new instructions, and a different encoding for these instructions.[13]

Most significant milestones in the evolution of eBPF
Date Event
April 2011 The first in-kernel Linux
just-in-time compiler (JIT compiler) for the classic Berkeley Packet Filter got merged.[14]
January 2012 The first non-networking use case of the classic Berkeley Packet Filter,
system calls
using a configurable policy implemented through BPF instructions.
March 2014 David S. Miller, primary maintainer of the Linux networking stack, accepted the rework of the old in-kernel BPF interpreter. It was replaced by an eBPF interpreter and the Linux kernel internally translates classic BPF (cBPF) into eBPF instructions.[16]
March 2015 The ability to attach eBPF to
kprobes as first tracing use case was merged.[18] In the same month, initial infrastructure work got accepted to attach eBPF to the networking traffic control (tc) layer allowing to attach eBPF to the core ingress and later also egress paths of the network stack, later heavily used by projects such as Cilium.[19][20][21]
August 2015 The eBPF compiler backend got merged into LLVM 3.7.0 release.[22]
September 2015 Brendan Gregg announced a collection of new eBPF-based tracing tools as the bcc project, providing a front-end for eBPF to make it easier to write programs.[23]
July 2016 eBPF got the ability to be attached into network driver's core receive path. This layer is known today as
DPDK to create a fast data path which works in combination with the Linux kernel rather than bypassing it.[24][25][26]
August 2016
LinuxCon as a project providing fast IPv6 container networking with eBPF and XDP. Today, Cilium has been adopted by major cloud provider's Kubernetes offerings and is one of the most widely used CNIs.[27][21][28]
November 2016 Netronome added offload of eBPF programs for XDP and tc BPF layer to their NIC.[29]
May 2017
facebook.com since then has been processed by eBPF & XDP.[30]
November 2017 eBPF becomes its own kernel subsystem to ease the continuously growing kernel patch management. The first pull request by eBPF maintainers was submitted.[31]
September 2017 Bpftool was added to the Linux kernel as a user space utility to introspect the eBPF subsystem.[32]
January 2018 A new socket family called AF_XDP was published, allowing for high performance packet processing with zero-copy semantics at the XDP layer.
DPDK has an official AF_XDP poll-mode driver support.[34]
February 2018 The bpfilter prototype has been published, allowing translation of a subset of iptables rulesets into eBPF via a newly developed user mode driver. The work has caused controversies due to the ongoing nftables development effort and has not been merged into mainline.[35][36]
October 2018 The new bpftrace tool has been announced by Brendan Gregg as DTrace 2.0 for Linux.[37]
November 2018 eBPF introspection has been added for kTLS in order to support the ability for in-kernel TLS policy enforcement.[38]
November 2018 BTF (BPF Type Format) has been added to the Linux kernel as an efficient meta data format which is approximately 100x smaller in size than DWARF.[39]
December 2019 The first 880-page long book on BPF, written by Brendan Gregg, was released.[40]
March 2020 Google upstreamed BPF LSM support into the Linux kernel, enabling programmable Linux Security Modules (LSMs) through eBPF.[41]
September 2020 The eBPF compiler backend for GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) was merged.[42]

Branding

The alias eBPF is often interchangeably used with BPF,[2][43] for example by the Linux kernel community. eBPF and BPF is referred to as a technology name like LLVM.[2] eBPF evolved from the Berkeley Packet Filter as an extended version, but its use case outgrew networking, and today eBPF as a pseudo-acronym is preferred.[2]

The bee is the official logo for eBPF. At the first eBPF Summit there was a vote taken and the bee mascot was named "eBee".[44][45] The logo has originally been created by Vadim Shchekoldin.[45] Earlier unofficial eBPF mascots have existed in the past,[46] but haven't seen widespread adoption.

Governance

The eBPF Foundation was created in August 2021 with the goal to expand the contributions being made to extend the powerful capabilities of eBPF and grow beyond Linux.

Crowdstrike, Tigera, DaoCloud, Datoms, FutureWei also joined.[48]

Adoption

eBPF has been adopted by a number of large-scale production users, for example:

Security

Due to the ease of programmability, eBPF has been used as a tool for implementing microarchitectural timing

microprocessors.[93] While unprivileged eBPF implemented mitigations against transient execution attacks,[94] unprivileged use has ultimately been disabled by the kernel community by default to protect from use against future hardware vulnerabilities.[95]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Meta, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft and Netflix Launch eBPF Foundation as Part of the Linux Foundation". Linux Foundation. 12 August 2021. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  2. ^ a b c d e "BPF Internals". USENIX LISA 2021 conference. 1 June 2021. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  3. ^ "eBPF and Kubernetes: Little Helper Minions for Scaling Microservices". CNCF KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020. 19 August 2020. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  4. ^ a b "Making eBPF work on Windows". Microsoft Open Source Blog. 10 May 2021. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  5. ^ a b "eBPF Documentation: What is eBPF?". eBPF.io. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  6. ^ "eBPF - Rethinking the Linux Kernel". QCon 2020. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  7. ^ "Safe Programs The Foundation of BPF". eBPF Summit 2021. 8 November 2020. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  8. ^ "BPF and Spectre: Mitigating transient execution attacks". POPL 2022 conference. 22 January 2022. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
  9. ^ "eBPF - The Silent Platform Revolution from Cloud Native" (PDF). SIGCOMM 2023, 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions. 10 September 2023. Retrieved 5 October 2023.
  10. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.33688.11529/4
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  11. ^ "Linux BPF Superpowers". Brendan Gregg's Blog. 5 March 2016. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
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  14. ^ "net: filter: Just In Time compiler". lore.kernel.org. April 2011. Retrieved 1 July 2022.
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  26. S2CID 53779310
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  43. ISBN 978-0136554820
    .
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Further reading

External links
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