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Aug 29, 2017

BPF updates 10

This is issue 10 of the regular newsletter around BPF written by Alexander Alemayhu. It summarizes ongoing development, presentations, videos and other information related to BPF and XDP. It is released roughly once a week.


The highlights since last time are

  • A new iteration of the Landlock unprivileged sandbox series.
  • A new iteration of the socket redirect series.
  • ARM eBPF JIT got finally merged.
  • Bug fixes and tests.

Now that there is 32bit eBPF JIT support for ARM, will more embedded devices start running eBPF? Marvell routers, wifi devices soon? :) Also worth checking out the Landlock documentation, which is really nice, both rendered and the code comments.

Some interesting topics from the lists

Presentations

Slides

Past, Present And Future Of High Speed Packet Filtering On Linux

Great slides on DDoS mitigation approaches with code examples for XDP.

Videos

FRNOG 28 - Quentin Monnet (6Wind) : Introduction à eBPF

Short introductory talk to eBPF.

USENIX ATC '17: Performance Superpowers with Enhanced BPF

Entertaining talk introducing BPF and highlighting some of the challenges. One of the more interesting ideas mentioned is the need for a higher level language. This seems like great a opportunity for someone to create a new language that fits the mindset of the users better.

In case you missed it

Cilium 0.10.1 release

The 0.10.1 release had a couple nice updates like a more compact monitor output, policy revision number, CIDR based filter, and much more. See the release notes for all the details.

sched-time.py and generalizing workloads

Debugging post using BCC.

Parse BPF_ARRAY macro in bcc

Closer look at one of the maps macros in BCC.

Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery

Mostly about load averages, but there is one or two mentions of eBPF in there.

Netdev 2.2 Registration

The early bird registration is still open til September, but why wait? There are already some interesting sessions scheduled like XDP for the Rest of Us and XDP + Netem = XNetem.

XDP Newbies...

Which is a place where people can talk about getting up to speed with setting up an XDP build environment and writing XDP programs.

You can subscribe by sending a email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org, with a message body containing subscribe xdp-newbies. No subject is needed, but you can of course add one if you like.

Projects

While grav itself is not strictly BPF related, the tools in the repository utilize BCC.

grav

A collection of tools to help visualise process execution.

Random cool note

eBPF is just a gateway drug to writing kernel code.

Patches

Please note that netdev receives a lot of patches and the list above is not meant to be comprehensive.

Happy eBPF hacking! ;)

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