A documentary on the development of eBPF

[Posted November 10, 2023 by corbet]

For folks with an interest in how extended BPF came to be and a half-hour to spare, the announcement has gone out of a new film called "eBPF: Unlocking the kernel", released at the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon event. The documentary is available on YouTube.

A documentary on the development of eBPF

Posted Nov 10, 2023 17:10 UTC (Fri) by carlosrodfern (subscriber, #166486) [Link] (3 responses)

ebpf has been indeed revolutionary. It is even superior to the Unix dtrace.

A documentary on the development of eBPF

Posted Nov 11, 2023 16:20 UTC (Sat) by larkey (guest, #104463) [Link] (2 responses)

I still miss any references to dtrace though, at least in the announcement and description :'D

It's like talking about the origins of systemd without mentioning launchd, upstart and smf...

A documentary on the development of eBPF

Posted Nov 13, 2023 17:25 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

>I still miss any references to dtrace though, at least in the announcement and description :'D
> It's like talking about the origins of systemd without mentioning launchd, upstart and smf...

ebpf origin and scope isn't really limited to tracing, so I wouldn't expect any such references there. If you are talking just about ebpftrace, that would be a more appropriate place for references or comparisons and they often do. Ex:

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for-l...

Dtrace even has a ebpf backend now.

A documentary on the development of eBPF

Posted Nov 14, 2023 4:51 UTC (Tue) by carenas (guest, #46541) [Link]

That is a good point, but in that same line, it would had been nice to hear about the previous experiments (maybe some even failed) that were the stepping stones for the "invention" of eBPF.

NetBSD has a Lua "interpreter" in the kernel for 10 years for example, and it also has a JIT compiler for its BPF rules.

There is some passing mention of how risky it was to do some runtime kernel modification with plain C modules, and also a reference to why it would be a good idea to base the new "VM" in the BPF one but goes too fast IMHO.

Obviously I wasn't expecting a deep technical discussion, but goes to point out that I might had not been the intended audience target and I am note sure who was, even if I otherwise enjoyed it.

A documentary on the development of eBPF

Posted Nov 11, 2023 18:52 UTC (Sat) by darmengod (subscriber, #130659) [Link]

Very nice documentary, not just for the technical or historical aspect of things, but also for focusing on the people involved and giving it a human aspect that is very often overlooked when discussing technology.

A documentary on the development of eBPF

Posted Nov 11, 2023 22:01 UTC (Sat) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (1 responses)

Is this a documentary?

I've watched it twice now, and it's really interesting, but it feels like an infomercial at best. It appears to document a technology with no downsides at all. I'm unconvinced.

A documentary on the development of eBPF

Posted Nov 13, 2023 10:14 UTC (Mon) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Well, someone had to fund this documentary. So I guess this is why it has a sort of infomercial feel to it.