Preface
“extended BPF use cases: …crazy stuff.”
—Alexei Starovoitov, creator of the new BPF, February 2015 [1]
In July 2014, Alexei Starovoitov visited the Netflix offices in Los Gatos, California, to discuss a fascinating new technology that he was developing: extended Berkeley Packet Filter (abbreviated eBPF or just BPF). BPF was an obscure technology for improving packet filter performance, and Alexei had a vision of extending it far beyond packets. Alexei had been working with another network engineer, Daniel Borkmann, to turn BPF into a general-purpose virtual machine, capable of running advanced networking and other programs. It was an incredible idea. A use case that interested me was performance analysis tools, and I saw how this BPF ...
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