Here&#x27;s a slide deck that explains what XDP is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.netfilter.org&#x2F;hawk&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;driving-IT2017&#x2F;driving-IT-2017_XDP_eBPF_technology_Jesper_Brouer.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.netfilter.org&#x2F;hawk&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;driving-IT20...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jvns.ca&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;05&#x2F;rust-bcc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jvns.ca&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;05&#x2F;rust-bcc&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s already done. LLVM IR can be compiled to eBPF already, and Rust compiles to LLVM IR. It just took a little bit of effort to make it not totally hacky, but that code isn&#x27;t OS.

Have you thought of adding an eBPF backend for Rust?I&#x27;m curious where you work. I&#x27;ve been doing eBPF in production for a while as well, but our control plane is Go &#x2F; C.

eBPF programs are bytecode that runs on a virtual machine in the kernel. The programs are limited by number of instructions and computational complexity (they must halt). These programs can transfer data back to user space using maps, which are simple data structures for passing things like lists of ips, for example. These eBPF programs are attached to probes in the kernel where they can gather information at the probe point. XDP is essentially a probe before any of the networking stack has happened. An XDP eBPF program can read and manipulate raw packet data, allowing you to process the packet as fast as your network card will allow, before that data is ever seen by the slow kernel networking code.Unlike other options like DPDK, eBPF programs are tightly integrated in the kernel. They allow you to write kernel code that the kernel can safely run. They are simple to write, easy to install (it&#x27;s just a syscall) and there are tools in Rust and other languages (check out BCC) that allow you to compile to eBPF bytecode from various languages. You&#x27;re also not just limited to networking. eBPF programs can hook in to many places in the kernel, and there are already efforts to build new system performance tools using eBPF.

can you give an ELI5 of the benefits of XDP over current technologies?

If anyone has any questions about XDP or eBBF in production, I&#x27;d be happy to answer. I&#x27;ve been working on an XDP deployment with Rust as the control plane language, and have found it to be an incredibly technology that makes high performance networking extremely accessible.Also, Katran is very cool. Facebook is doing really cutting edge work in the networking space.

If you Like XDP you may check AF_XDP! It&#x27;s like PCAP but EXTREMELY fast!It require kernel 4.18+ and you can use my guide to build test application very fast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pavel-odintsov&#x2F;fastnetmon&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;af_xdp-tests-for-Linux-4.19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pavel-odintsov&#x2F;fastnetmon&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;af_xdp-tes...</a>

No video yet, but here you have the paper.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vger.kernel.org&#x2F;lpc-networking2018.html#session-10" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vger.kernel.org&#x2F;lpc-networking2018.html#session-10</a>On the other hand, Cilium.io made a good summary of that. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cilium.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;fb-bpf-firewall" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cilium.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;fb-bpf-firewall</a>

These slides seem to be rather incomprehensible without the accompanying talk.Edit: Oh boy. That&#x27;s so obviously not a criticism of the talk.

XDP: 1.5 years in production [pdf]