The eBPF Foundation, which brings together a cross-platform community of eBPF-related projects from across the open source ecosystem in an independent forum, has published a new report, The State of eBPF. Created in collaboration with Linux Foundation Research, the report explores the history of eBPF, and the impact it is having on application development. 

eBPF allows users to run custom programs inside an operating system such as the Linux kernel or Windows, making execution up to ten times faster and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, which enables engineers to see where a system is going wrong and find fixes faster, networking, which involves everything from how fast emails move to how fast computation occurs, to security, which keeps our digital lives and infrastructure safer from cyber threats.

The State of eBPF is a qualitative research report which covers the evolution of eBPF, the revolution it created, what's being built with it today, challenges, and where it is heading. The report provides valuable insight into how to make the most of what eBPF offers currently, plans for the future, and how stakeholders can get involved with the project to help it continue to improve. More than a dozen key maintainers and contributors to eBPF were interviewed for the report, along with analyzing publicly available repositories of eBPF-related projects.

"Adoption of eBPF and related projects has continued to accelerate to the point where it is being used at scales from small deployments up to hyperscale cloud operations across billions of devices, and by default in many operating systems," said Linux Foundation SVP of Research Hilary Carter. "The State of eBPF report is a valuable resource for the community to better understand the value of eBPF and how they can further benefit from it in the future."

The State of eBPF is available to download for free.