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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

Hm. I guess no-one has bothered with nftables yet, even when dealing with network code that's becoming part of the new upstream kernel (not just this blog, AFAIK wireguard upstream doesn't have any examples on using nftables either, just iptables).

I guess we need a new networking how-to?

Anyone aware of some resources I might have missed?

OK, I guess the nftables wiki is the "how-to": https://wiki.nftables.org/wiki-nftables/index.php/Main_Page

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The community kind of skipped right over nftables to BPF. Simple use cases use iptables, complicated ones use BPF, nftables isn't flexible enough for the complicated use cases so everyone keeps using iptables.

even for simple cases, I prefer nftables. If for no other reason thn I think the syntax is simpler and easier to understand.

Sure, but most admins have to learn iptables anyway, and many prefer to learn one tool instead of two.

What is BPF (in the context of iptables/nftables replacement) exactly? I tried searching for it, but only found some articles about early stage kernel support. Nothing about userspace or how to use it at all. It looks like there's still no BPF firewall at this time.

We're using BPF for packet filtering in production on my team today, but it's not directly an iptables/nftables replacement- it's an entire kernel subsystem used in several parts of the kernel and also useful for diverse use cases such as performance profiling, syscall tracing and packet filtering. It's also seen rapid development in recent kernels and most internet articles about it are out of date.

Something I wrote for the ArchWiki [1]:

> BPF is a system used to load and execute bytecode within the kernel dynamically during runtime. It is used in a number of Linux kernel subsystems such as networking (e.g. XDP, tc), tracing (e.g. kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints) and security (e.g. seccomp). It is also useful for advanced network security, performance profiling and dynamic tracing.

> BPF was originally an acronym of "Berkeley Packet Filter" since the original classic BPF was used for packet capture tools for BSD. This eventually evolved into Extended BPF (eBPF), which was shortly afterwards renamed to just BPF (not an acronym). BPF should not be confused with packet filtering tools like iptables or netfilter, although BPF can be used to implement packet filtering tools.

lwn.net has a decent (although 3 years old) intro article [2]. Cilium has a good document on how they use BPF to implement a packet filter [3].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security#BPF_hardening

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/740157/

[3] http://docs.cilium.io/en/latest/bpf/

@WGH_ You're dead - presumably because the profile is new, and immediately made a comment? I think maybe anti-spam is a bit aggressive, unless there's some linked account that accounts for the ban?

At any rate, I agree information on bpf as a iptables work-a-like is scarce. This helps a bit:

https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-wha...

Then there's of course the kernel docs, eg: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

IMO nftables is best used with your full ruleset defined in a file, and atomically loaded. nftables certainly does make your ruleset more grokkable than statefully appending ad-hoc rules everywhere, but you necessarily need the whole picture to gain from it.

So unfortunately it makes less sense for one-liners. Case in point: to use the masquerade action in a postrouting/nat chain, you also have to register a (possibly empty) prerouting/nat chain.

So unfortunately it makes less sense for one-liners. Case in point: to use the masquerade action in a postrouting/nat chain, you also have to register a (possibly empty) prerouting/nat chain.

You don't have to do that since Linux 4.18: https://wiki.nftables.org/wiki-nftables/index.php/Performing...

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