Oracle Continues Working On eBPF Support For GCC 10

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Continues Working On eBPF Support For GCC 10

Back in May we wrote about Oracle's initial plans for introducing an eBPF back-end to GCC 10 to allow this GNU compiler to target this general purpose in-kernel virtual machine. Up to this point LLVM Clang has been the focused compiler for eBPF but those days are numbered with Oracle on Friday pushing out the newest GCC patches...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-GCC-10-eBPF-V2

[Unklejoe]

Does this mean I’ll be able to write packet filters in C? What is the output? Text of the instructions?

[Garp]

Does this mean I’ll be able to write packet filters in C? What is the output? Text of the instructions?

You can do that already. If you're interested in digging in to that, look out for XDP (https://www.iovisor.org/technology/xdp). eBPF supports lots of things, not just packet filters. Currently compiling eBPF code requires LLVM/Clang to do the compilation, GCC doesn't support it, which is what this appears to be trying to rectify.

There's a thorough introduction to eBPF here: https://lwn.net/Articles/740157/