eBPF & XDP: Programmable Kernel Networking

High-Performance Networking & Cloud-Native · 30 illustrated lessons (text/HTML)

Outcomes

• Write, verify and load eBPF/XDP programs with libbpf and CO-RE
• Build a high-performance L4 load balancer and DDoS filter
• Deploy and observe eBPF programs in production

Where we teach this

• NET-201 · XDP & eBPF Programmable Networking live cohort

The lessons

Every lesson in this curriculum, in the order we teach it.

• 1Introduction: the eBPF and XDP landscape
• 2How kernel programmability evolved: from kernel modules to eBPF
• 3eBPF fundamentals
• 4Development environment setup
• 5Your first eBPF program: Hello World
• 6eBPF program types explained
• 7The eBPF verifier in depth
• 8eBPF maps explained
• 9eBPF helper functions explained
• 10XDP technology overview
• 11Your first XDP program: a simple packet dropper
• 12XDP packet processing
• 13XDP actions and return values explained
• 14XDP with eBPF maps: shared state and complex logic
• 15Advanced XDP performance tuning
• 16XDP in practice: a high-performance L4 load balancer
• 17XDP in practice: DDoS mitigation and traffic scrubbing
• 18XDP in practice: custom traffic monitoring and statistics
• 19BPF tail calls: principles, limits and chaining in XDP programs
• 20BPF-to-BPF function calls: modular eBPF design and code reuse
• 21CO-RE and BTF: compile-once, run-everywhere for eBPF
• 22Developing with libbpf
• 23User-space control programs
• 24eBPF and network namespaces: deploying and managing eBPF/XDP programs in containers
• 25eBPF and Kubernetes: next-generation programmable kernel networking
• 26XDP and hardware offload: deploying XDP programs on SmartNICs and their performance gains
• 27Security and observability: eBPF-based syscall tracing, audit and profiling
• 28Debugging and troubleshooting: common eBPF/XDP problems, tools and methods
• 29Production deployment: benchmarking, resource limits, security policies and canary releases
• 30Core value recap: why eBPF/XDP?