BPF comes to firewalls

Posted Feb 20, 2018 7:01 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: BPF comes to firewalls

So what is the origin of BPF? I thought the PF stood for packet filter because it had originated as a way to compile firewall rules — but according to the article this is the first time it has been used there.

BPF comes to firewalls

Posted Feb 20, 2018 7:17 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

And the "B" stands for Berkely, where it originated. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Packet_Filter) is a bit light on details, but you will find them in the original paper (http://www.tcpdump.org/papers/bpf-usenix93.pdf).

BPF comes to firewalls

Posted Feb 20, 2018 16:17 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

It was originally used for filtering of packets for tools like tcpdump, so that when you say "show me traffic on tcp port 80 to this IP" the kernel can very quickly select the data you want and feed it to you at wire speed.