eBPF appears across 3 articles and 4 open source projects to date.
Who is eBPF?
eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is a kernel-level technology that enables the safe execution of user-defined programs inside the Operating System (OS) to observe and modify behavior in areas such as networking, security, and performance.
- Open, vendor-neutral foundation focused on eBPF technology and its ecosystem.
- Community and project governance for eBPF-based tooling and platforms.
- Coordination of standards, documentation, and education around eBPF use in production environments.
- Support for collaboration between OS vendors, cloud providers, and enterprises adopting eBPF.
- Promotion of eBPF-based approaches for observability, security, and networking use cases.
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More About eBPF
eBPF is a programmable layer in the OS kernel that allows small, sandboxed programs to be attached to hooks in networking, system call handling, tracing, and other low-level paths. These programs run in a constrained environment verified by the kernel for safety, which enables deep visibility and control without requiring custom kernel modules. Enterprise and institutional users employ eBPF to implement network observability (observability), security enforcement (security), and performance analysis (performance engineering) that operate close to the kernel while remaining dynamically updatable.
In networking (network operations), eBPF programs can attach to packet processing paths to classify, filter, or redirect traffic. This enables use cases such as load balancing, traffic shaping, and policy enforcement with per-packet visibility. Because eBPF executes in the kernel, enterprises can implement these behaviors without modifying the kernel source or rebooting systems. The technology integrates with standard Linux kernel mechanisms and exposes maps and helper functions to exchange data between kernel space and user space, supporting real-time telemetry and control loops.
In security (endpoint and workload security), eBPF hooks into system calls, process lifecycle events, and networking paths to observe behavior and apply policies. Organizations can monitor file access patterns, process execution, and network connections at runtime, and enforce rules such as blocking certain operations or tagging events for further analysis. This model allows security controls to be deployed as eBPF programs rather than as monolithic kernel modules, which can simplify rollout and reduce operational risk associated with kernel changes.
For observability and performance monitoring (observability and Application Performance Management (APM)), eBPF can trace application and kernel events with low overhead. Enterprises use eBPF-based tooling to collect metrics, logs, and traces from applications and infrastructure without code changes, by attaching to function entry and exit points or kernel tracepoints. This enables analysis of latency, resource utilization, and dependency behavior across microservices, containers, and traditional workloads. The ability to deploy and update eBPF programs at runtime supports iterative tuning of instrumentation in production environments.
The eBPF Foundation coordinates work across these domains by providing a neutral forum for contributors to define common architectures, APIs, and governance practices. Its scope covers core eBPF technology and related projects that target Linux and other operating systems adopting compatible eBPF implementations. In enterprise directories, eBPF and the eBPF Foundation can be categorized under kernel-level programmability, with primary solution areas spanning networking, observability, and security, and secondary relevance to cloud-native infrastructure, container platforms, and DevOps toolchains.
Our description of eBPF. Updated January 2026.
