Last year, the first workshop entirely dedicated to eBPF was hosted by the SIGCOMM conference. Today, I’m happy to share the first eBPF research grant, from the eBPF Foundation!

ebpf.foundation/funding-opportunities

Despite being developed and maintained in large part by industry, eBPF has always had strong ties with the academic community. The eBPF ancestor, cBPF, was first published at Usenix Winter 1993. Subsequent work on eBPF, such as XDP or PREVAIL, was also published at top academic conferences, often in the context of industry-academia partnerships. In addition, on multiple occasions, Alexei Starovoitov stated his goal to build eBPF as an enabler for innovation. I believe this was always well understood by the academic community, with papers at top conferences regularly building on eBPF1.

This new grant comes as a $25–50k unrestricted gift and can for instance be used to cover part of a PhD student’s salary. I hope it will serve as an additional incentive for the kernel and academic communities to collaborate. I’m a strong believer that the kernel community would benefit from further research on eBPF and its verifier, particularly in formal verification, static analysis, and compiler theory.

Thanks a lot to Daniel Borkmann and Bill Mulligan for setting this up!


  1. The Hyperupcalls (ATC’18), hXDP (OSDI’20), BMC (NSDI’21), and Tigger (VLDB’23) papers come to mind, among many others. ↩