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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

The article unfortunately does not say what eBPF stand for.

Edit: it is the Berkeley Packet Filter.

More valuable is actually describing what it does/what it's for. And the article does this:

""" eBPF is a functionality of linux kernel that allows lightweight execution of user code as a response to kernel events. The events could be hardware/software events, tracing events both static (compiled into code) and dynamic (attached in runtime), etc. The code itself is limited in a sense that it is guaranteed to finish (no loops) and is verified before loading into kernel. """

Arguably this is a much more useful description for people who don't know what eBPF is, since "packet filter" makes it sound like it's exclusively for firewalling and/or routing.

Awesome! I finally understood what the fuss about eBPF is all about :p

Thanks for pointing this out!

If I remember correctly, eBPF originally stood for "Extended Berkeley Packet Filter". However, it's usage changed from a packet filter to general purpose kernel hook system.

A little while after that, eBPF stopped being an acronym and started being the actual name. It, as I understand it, no longer stands for "Extended Berkeley Packet Filter".

In that case I wish they would make a new backronym or change the name. Having acronyms that used to stand for something but now stand for nothing feels like (somewhat common) antipattern.

In modern parlance I believe the desire is to move away from the acronym and have BPF just be a standalone name since its functionality goes beyond a packet filter now.

That makes sense. Thank You.

I thought they had something against Berkeley / BSD.

When my eyes first alit upon it, I thought it was something to do with extended backus-naur form[1].

1 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus%E2%80%93Naur_f...

Ironically, if you spell it out it only gets more confusing, because it does a lot more than just packer filtering these days.

Originally BPF aka the Berkeley packet filter was written to provide a faster/more lightweight alternative to tcpdump. People realized it was an awesome idea, so they started adding more functionality and it became eBPF/extended berkeley packet filter.

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