Major IT companies including Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft, and Netflix are getting together to form the eBPF Foundation. eBPF, extended Berkeley Packet Filter, is a technology that can run sandboxed programs in an operating system kernel.

eBPF's roots lie in Linux. The The Berkeley Packet Filter was developed for network traffic analysis. This was extended and included in Linux 4 to be a kernel technology that allows programs to run without having to change the kernel source code or adding additional modules.

eBPF is now used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel without requiring to change kernel source code or load kernel modules.

eBPF is already used for projects including providing high-performance networking and load-balancing in modern data centers and cloud native environments, helping application developers trace applications, providing insights for performance troubleshooting, and preventive application and container runtime security enforcement.

The aim of the eBPF Foundation is to raise, budget and spend funds in support of various open source, open data and/or open standards projects relating to eBPF technologies, including infrastructure. The foundation will also support initiatives related to those aims, and technical projects

eBPF has been around since 2014, and while it has become widely used in data centers, it has increasingly been more widely adopted - Google now uses eBPF in its managed Kubernetes products GKE and Anthos as the new networking, security, and observability layer.

However, according to the founding members of the eBPF Foundation, could be much more widely used. Thomas Graf, CTO & Co-Founder of founder member Isovalent, said:

“Remember when web browsers became programmable with languages such as JavaScript? All of a sudden users no longer had to install new versions of web browsers in order to benefit from the latest innovations. This unlocked an incredible wave of innovation and the web browser has become the standard platform for the majority of applications. Think of eBPF as making the operating system programmable in the same way as JavaScript and other languages have done this to the web browser."

More Information

eBPF Foundation Website

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