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A comment on Extended BPF: A New Type of Software [pdf].

Re:Extended BPF: A New Type of Software [pdf] by BubRoss on Thursday December 05, 2019 @11:56AM (#21713889)
Is there a good explanation for why saying this is a 'new type of software' and a 'fundamental change to the 50 year old kernel structure' isn't hyperbole? I understand that it is some sort of constrained virtual machine that can analyze packets, bit it seems like the marketing here is a little much.
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Re:Extended BPF: A New Type of Software [pdf] by allset_ on Thursday December 05, 2019 @12:44PM (#21714375)
It can do much more than analyze packets. It's a way of running user defined programs in kernel space with fairly strong assurances that it won't crash the kernel.
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Re:Extended BPF: A New Type of Software [pdf] by farisjarrah on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:14PM (#21716601)
BPF programs can hook directly into the kernel more or less and can safely share memory to userspace. This is important because after all the fall out from Spectre and Meltdown, they found that the BPF virtual machine programs were immune from this class of vulnerabilities.
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Re:Extended BPF: A New Type of Software [pdf] by aey on Thursday December 05, 2019 @08:27PM (#21718520)
It’s a culmination of decades of research and implementation to mainstream Ring-0 OS kernels that are upgradable at runtime with untrusted userspace code.
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