Speaker
Description
The body of academic work on eBPF is growing so large and scattered that it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. Papers span all kinds of topics and conferences, vary wildly in quality, and are often dense and hard to parse.
This talk will present the dominant trends of research. To that end, we will first explain academia's heuristics to identify "high-quality papers"—it is not the number of citations!—and what it means for a paper to be considered high-quality. We’ll then show that a handful of teams are behind most of these standout eBPF papers.
Finally, we will see that only specific research topics are leading to contributions upstream and explain why that might be. We will discuss how the kernel community could encourage research on specific problems, should it choose to do so.