Early packet drop — and more — with BPF
Early packet drop — and more — with BPF
[Kernel] Posted Apr 6, 2016 13:44 UTC (Wed) by corbet
The Berkeley packet filter (BPF) mechanism has been working its way into various kernel subsystems since it was rewritten and extended in 2014. There is, it turns out, great value in an in-kernel virtual machine that allows for the implementation of arbitrary policies without writing kernel code. A recent patch set pushing BPF into networking drivers shows some of the potential of this mechanism — and the difficulty of designing its integration in a way that will stand the test of time. If it is successful, it may change the way high-performance networking is done on Linux systems.