Chapter 1. Introduction
This chapter introduces some key terminology, summarizes technologies, and demonstrates some BPF performance tools. These technologies will be explained in more detail in the following chapters.
1.1 What Are BPF and eBPF?
BPF stands for Berkeley Packet Filter, an obscure technology first developed in 1992 that improved the performance of packet capture tools [McCanne 92]. In 2013, Alexei Starovoitov proposed a major rewrite of BPF [2], which was further developed by Alexei and Daniel Borkmann and included in the Linux kernel in 2014 [3]. This turned BPF into a general-purpose execution engine that can be used for a variety of things, including the creation of advanced performance analysis tools.
BPF can be difficult ...
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