As 2025 comes to a close, the eBPF Foundation is proud to reflect on a year marked by deep technical progress, expanding global adoption, and growing collaboration across research, industry, and community spaces. What stood out this year wasn’t a single breakthrough feature, but a steady accumulation of work that makes eBPF something operators can rely on, from better testing to safer runtimes, stronger tooling, and a community that now spans kernel developers, cloud providers, researchers, and practitioners running this technology at serious scale.
That shift shows up clearly in this year’s State of eBPF report, which highlights how eBPF is becoming the strategic platform of choice for infrastructure teams. In response, the Foundation invested in areas of the ecosystem that required the most support. Notable efforts include upstream development that improves the developer experience, high-impact academic research, launching a new fellowship program and meetup program, and publishing real-world use cases from some of the world’s largest tech companies. These milestones highlight eBPF’s growing importance as a core enabler of secure, observable, and efficient cloud native infrastructure and how eBPF is becoming a permanent part of how modern infrastructure is built and operated.
Funding Upstream Development
Key development priorities for the community can fall between the cracks of what different companies and individuals are focusing on. Testing infrastructure, cross-architecture parity, and long-term maintainability rarely map cleanly to product roadmaps, but without them, everything else becomes fragile. In 2025, the eBPF Foundation continued to focus on funding projects to fill these gaps, with an emphasis on improving the day-to-day experience of developing and running eBPF. Major milestones included:
- Improving the eBPF tests in the kernel: This post covers test suite expansion and rewriting legacy BPF samples to improve CI alignment and catch regressions early. The work increased automated test coverage, which improves stability and reduces the risk of regressions as the eBPF subsystem continues evolving.
- Bouncing on trampolines to run eBPF programs: We also supported improvements to how eBPF programs attach to kernel functions, prioritizing clean abstractions and CI coverage, which resulted in reduced overhead in performance when attaching many programs, more predictable behavior, and simplified maintenance of attach logic when kernel functions change.
- The Dwarves Beneath the Kernel: Forging BTF for eBPF: BTF tooling improvements and strengthening BTF support for introspection and tooling automation resulted in improved BTF portability, reduced image size compared to DWARF, and laid the groundwork for better developer ergonomics and wider architecture support.
Work continues toward achieving feature parity between x86-64 and ARM64 architectures as eBPF adoption grows across cloud and edge devices.
Strengthening Upstream Security
We received a $228,200 grant from the Alpha-Omega Foundation this year to support critical upstream security work for eBPF. This work aims to harden the eBPF runtime and ensure long-term safety as adoption grows across architectures. The funding supports two major efforts:
- Defensive runtime tooling: Enabling KASAN for JIT-compiled eBPF programs to validate memory accesses at runtime.
- Security auditing: Reviews of x86-64, arm64, and riscv64 JIT compilers, including instruction encoding, register allocation, and immediate value handling, checking verifier to JIT integrity, and assessing unprivileged surfaces.
Advancing Safety and Efficiency with Academic Research
In 2025, the eBPF Foundation continues its commitment to academic collaboration by awarding $100,000 in grants to research teams focused on advancing eBPF’s safety and efficiency:
- University of Michigan: The ePASS (eBPF Policy-Aware Secure Systems) project is an in-kernel LLVM-like compiler framework that extends static verification in eBPF by integrating a verifier-cooperative runtime enforcement approach. The goals of ePass are to improve programmability without compromising safety, and to enhance safety beyond what static verification alone can provide.
- University of California, Riverside: eBPF Governors is a framework for dynamic, low-latency, QoS-aware power management in Linux data centers. The project works to address the growing energy demands of AI and cloud based workloads, with the goal of providing an extensible framework for power management governors across power states and processing units by leveraging eBPF.
This year’s grants build on the success of the 2024 research, and we are looking at the road ahead for more opportunities to support the growing academic research ecosystem around eBPF.
Real World Success Stories With eBPF
Starting this year, the eBPF Foundation began publishing detailed case studies from companies using eBPF in production. Their stories show how eBPF delivers measurable impact across networking, observability, profiling, and security:
- Meta: Deployed Strobelight, reducing CPU cycles and server load by up to 20%.
- Polar Signals: Cut internal Kubernetes network traffic costs by 50% with eBPF-based monitoring.
- Bytedance: Improved networking performance by 10% with eBPF enhancements.
- Datadog: Enhanced network observability and decreased CPU usage by 35%.
- Canopus: Reinvented network observability to reduce server footprint by 3x.
- Rakuten Mobile: Leveraged eBPF for anomaly detection in cloud native telecom networks.
- Ant Group: Combined Kata Containers and eBPF for fine-grained platform security.
- Alibaba Cloud: Used eBPF for adaptive L7 load balancing and reduced unit infrastructure costs by 19%.
Whether it’s optimizing load balancing or cutting cloud costs, these use cases highlight what’s possible with eBPF today, and the performance benefits in production.
eBPF for the Infrastructure Platform Whitepaper
eBPF for the Infrastructure Platform explores how eBPF has become the foundation for modern infrastructure teams, powering everything from L7 networking and runtime security to LLM observability and FinOps. It highlights how eBPF is becoming the strategic platform of choice for infrastructure teams.
It provides companies with guidance on how to implement eBPF in their infrastructure, product categories that will be affected by eBPF, and gives an outlook towards the changes that will ease developer adoption and shape its future use cases.
You can download the full report to learn how companies like Netflix and Cloudflare are using eBPF today, and what’s next for programmable infrastructure.
Global Community Support
Conference Sponsorships
The eBPF Foundation was a platinum sponsor of both the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) and Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management & BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) this year. The community came together at LPC in a dedicated eBPF track and at LSFMM+BPF with a BPF track, bringing speakers from our global community to share their use cases and new ideas.
Introducing the Community & Advocacy Fellowship
We recently launched the eBPF Community & Advocacy Fellowship, designed to recognize and support individuals who help to grow the eBPF ecosystem for an increasingly global and diverse set of users, contributors, and end users. The inaugural fellowship recipients, Teodor Janez Podobnik and Yusheng Zheng, are engaging developers, translating content, and helping newcomers find their footing in the eBPF ecosystem.
As we move toward 2026, we are excited to expand upon the program and build the next generation of technical leaders and community builders.
Supporting eBPF Meetups
The eBPF Foundation is investing in the global community with the announcement of a new eBPF Meetup Program. The program offers an opportunity to grow the eBPF community in your area by providing financial support to community members organizing local meetups.
Looking Ahead
As we look forward to the coming year, we embrace opportunities to expand upon our current efforts of community building and education. We will continue to publish findings from new research, support upstream development and architecture parity, and build and grow programs like the new Fellowship and Meetup programs.
As eBPF becomes a permanent fixture in modern infrastructure, the ecosystem is moving from experimentation to stewardship. All of the work that the Foundation is doing makes a clearer path from idea to production without losing the flexibility that made eBPF compelling in the first place. Additionally, programs like the Fellowship and Meetup initiatives are helping ensure that knowledge and community, not just code, continue to grow.
Now it’s your turn to help move the eBPF ecosystem forward. If you’re using eBPF in production, submit a case study to be featured on our website and share your experiences with others. If you are new to the community, join a meetup around you, check.
Whether you’re writing code, designing observability pipelines, or evaluating eBPF for production workloads, there has never been a better time to get involved. Become a member and help shape the future of the technology that is defining the next generation of infrastructure platforms.
Here’s to another year of collaboration, contribution, and innovation.