If I navigate to https://blog.cloudflare.com/, my browser will connect to a remote TCP address from the local IP address assigned to my machine, and a randomly chosen local TCP port. What happens if I then decide to head to another site?
We have first adopted the BPF tail calls when building our XDP-based packet processing pipeline. BPF tail calls have served us well since then. But they do have their caveats
Chances are you might have heard of io_uring. It first appeared in Linux 5.1, back in 2019, and was advertised as the new API for asynchronous I/O. Its goal was to be an alternative to the deemed-to-be-broken-beyond-repair AIO, the “old” asynchronous I/O API
It’s not every day that you get to debug what may well be a packet of death. It was certainly the first time for me. What do I mean by “a packet of death”? A software bug where the network stack crashes in reaction to a single received network packet, taking down the whole operating system with it.
We have been dealing with conntrack, the connection tracking layer in the Linux kernel, for years. And yet, despite the collected know-how, questions about its inner workings occasionally come up. When they do, it is hard to resist the temptation to go digging for answers.
We recently gave a presentation on Programming socket lookup with BPF at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal.
It is unlikely we can tell you anything new about the extended Berkeley Packet Filter, eBPF for short, if you've read all the great man pages, docs, guides, and some of our blogs out there. But we can tell you a war story, who doesn't like those?
