Recently at I gave a short talk titled "Linux at Cloudflare". The talk ended up being mostly about BPF. It seems, no matter the question - BPF is the answer. Here is a transcript of a slightly adjusted version of that talk.
eBPF can't count?!
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?
xdpcap: XDP Packet Capture
Our servers process a lot of network packets, be it legitimate traffic or large denial of service attacks. To do so efficiently, we’ve embraced eXpress Data Path (XDP), a Linux kernel technology that provides a high performance mechanism for low level packet processing.
io_submit: The epoll alternative you've never heard about
The Linux AIO is designed for, well, Asynchronous disk IO! Disk files are not the same thing as network sockets! Is it even possible to use the Linux AIO API with network sockets in the first place? The answer turns out to be a strong YES!
Know your SCM_RIGHTS
As TLS 1.3 was ratified earlier this year, I was recollecting how it started here at Cloudflare. We made the decision to be early adopters of TLS 1.3 a little over two years ago.