How to Contribute to eBPF

eBPF consists of many communities including the eBPF runtime in the Linux kernel, various development SDKs and libraries, a series of large projects using eBPF, and a wide set of smaller projects and tools. There are therefore many ways to contribute to the eBPF community and get involved. The following list of ideas can serve as a starting point on how you can get involved and contribute to the community.

The Linux kernel community is maintaining separate Git trees for the eBPF subsystem to manage all developer contributions. The trees are maintained by:

• Alexei Starovoitov, Facebook
• Daniel Borkmann, Cilium/Isovalent

Working on the eBPF runtime can be incredibly rewarding as it builds the foundation for software being written that runs on millions of systems and devices. Work includes a wide range of topics from adding support to additional hooks, adding new program types, improvements to the eBPF verifier, adding JIT support for additional CPU architectures, extending the set of BPF helpers, adding new test cases to BPF’s test infrastructure, or improvements to bpftool and libbpf. See Linux kernel eBPF runtime for additional details.

The list of eBPF-based projects is long and growing. It will be simple to find a project that sparks interest. Check out the eBPF landscape to see an overview of eBPF-based projects.

Many of the listed eBPF-based projects maintain a list of good-first-issue-labeled tasks which are scoped to not require extensive project specific knowledge and provide a great opportunity to get hands-on quickly.

Even though the Linux kernel provides minimal libraries and APIs to use eBPF directly, the majority of projects leverage an eBPF development toolchain to simplify use of eBPF and share common code among other projects.

Check out eBPF development toolchains for a frequently updated list of projects in this space. You will find information on how to get involved on each project website directly.

Do you have a writing talent? Are you good with diagrams? The content of the ebpf.io website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If you want to get involved, visit the GitHub repository. Make sure to also join the #ebpf Slack channel to get in touch with the team working on the documentation. Share what you have learned by improving the documentation or write additional tutorials.