GNU Binutils Begins Landing eBPF Support

The GNU Binutils is finally getting wired up around the Extended BPF (eBPF) as the modern, in-kernel virtual machine that stretches the Berkeley Packet Filter beyond the networking subsystem.

Compiling for eBPF has most commonly been done by the LLVM eBPF back-end to allow compiling C into the eBPF bytecode but it looks like the GNU toolchain developers are looking to increase their support around the increasingly common eBPF use-cases for this in-kernel VM.

Merged on Thursday was the initial plumbing around elf64-bpf and adding eBPF support to the Gas Assembler, LD linker, and Binutils.

Additional details can be found within the GNU Binutils eBPF commits here ahead of the Binutils 2.33 release later in the year.