
Extended BPF: A New Type of Software [pdf] - Terretta
http://www.brendangregg.com/Slides/UM2019_BPF_a_new_type_of_software.pdf
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wyldfire
Recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691024)

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aey
BPF is an awesome VM. A huge thanks to Brendan on the work he has done to make
it usable outside the kernel.

We built a whole rust tool chain around it.

[https://github.com/solana-labs/rust-bpf-sysroot](https://github.com/solana-
labs/rust-bpf-sysroot) [https://github.com/solana-labs/rust-bpf-
builder](https://github.com/solana-labs/rust-bpf-builder)

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throwaway894345
Can you elaborate on what makes it a good VM? I know very little about VMs,
but I'm curious.

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aey
It’s doesn’t have a stack pointer, just stack frames. So hardware that doesn’t
implement a stack can execute BPF kernels.

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BubRoss
Is there a good explanation for why saying this is a 'new type of software'
and a 'fundamental change to the 50 year old kernel structure' isn't
hyperbole? I understand that it is some sort of constrained virtual machine
that can analyze packets, bit it seems like the marketing here is a little
much.

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allset_
It can do much more than analyze packets. It's a way of running user defined
programs in kernel space with fairly strong assurances that it won't crash the
kernel.

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cbdumas
This seems like a roundabout way of getting to something much more like what
wikipedia calls a "Language-based System"[1], which is something I've been
thinking about a lot lately. Very cool.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-
based_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-based_system)

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0xdeadbeefbabe
If this isn't really about packet filtering we could call it something else,
right?

xmlHttpRequest became Ajax after all.

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staticassertion
eBPF seems like a great privesc path of the future.

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ganzuul
ED: Can't delete.

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Garph
The presenter expresses BPF has become a technology name for this type of
kernel application and is no longer an acronym

