12–14 Sept 2022
Europe/Dublin timezone

The journey of BPF from restricted C language towards extended and safe C.

12 Sept 2022, 10:00
30m
"Pembroke" (Clayton Hotel on Burlington Road)

"Pembroke"

Clayton Hotel on Burlington Road

262
eBPF & Networking Track eBPF & Networking

Speaker

Alexei Starovoitov (Meta)

Description

BPF programs can be written in C, Rust, Assembly, and even in Python. The majority of the programs are in C. The subset of C usable to write BPF programs was never strictly defined. It started very strict. Loops were not allowed, global variables were not available, etc As BPF ecosystem grew the subset of C language became bigger. But then something interesting happened. The C language itself became a limiting factor. Compile Once Run Everywhere technology required new language features and the intrinsics were added. Then the type tagging was added. More compiler and language extensions are being developed. BPF programs are now written in what can be considered a flavor of C language. The C language is becoming a safe C. Other languages rely on garbage collection (like golang) or don't prevent memory leaks (like C or C++) the extended and safe C is addressing not only this programmer's concern, but other bugs typical in C code. This talk will explore whether BPF's safe C one day will become the language of choice for the core kernel and user space programs.

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Primary author

Alexei Starovoitov (Meta)

Presentation materials

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