Building Socket-Aware BPF Programs

Explore the advancements in BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) programming for socket awareness in this 30-minute conference talk from the Linux Plumbers Conference. Dive into the evolution of BPF's capabilities, including enhanced verifier intelligence and API extensions. Learn about new verifier extensions that enable reference tracking in BPF programs, allowing for safe allocation and release of resources during program execution. Discover how these improvements facilitate the addition of socket lookup and release function calls to the BPF API, enabling programs to interact more closely with the networking stack. Gain insights into practical applications such as load balancing based on listening applications and implementing stateful firewalling primitives. Understand how these developments empower BPF programs to build more sophisticated logic around socket presence and attributes, enhancing their integration with kernel-level traffic management.