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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

Nowhere does the article define BPF.

Kids, always define all acronyms when first using them in technical writing, as in: Work toward the signing of Big Pill Foundation (BPF) programs has been finding its way into recent mainline kernel releases...

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If you're reading LWN over the last decade then BPF is implicitly understood at this point. Expanding the acronym is actually incredibly useless in this case.

Additionally, the technology behind BPF changed significantly in the last years to the point where the original meaning (Berkeley Packet Filter) doesn't really have anything to do with BPF anymore. BPF is not limited to network sockets anymore (or something else associated with Berkeley), it is not limited to packets anymore and filtering is not the only use case anymore. The reason that the BPF acronym stuck all those years is that the new BPF features were introduced gradually, there was no particular kernel release introducing a BPF version 2 with all the new features (a release which could have been used for changing the name).

In theory, the kernel people could come up with a new acronym (something like Kernel Bytecode Language might be appropriate), but at this point it's probably too late.

At some point, you have to accept that on a technical site like this, there is going to be jargon used (including abbreviations) with furtjer explication of meaning. Would you complain about using DNS? Or HTTP?

That is a good point. I'm not convinced I'm incorrect, but you are also correct.

Normally I’d agree, but in this case the meaning of the acronym tells you nothing (it stands for Berkeley Packet Filter. Make sense?) and BPF is easily googleable.

Also, it’s safe to assume that regular readers of LWN will know a little about BPF. Though obviously in this case it rose to the top of HN where it’s likely to be seen by a wider audience.

I agree with you.

It's was originally eBPF and that doesnt really tell you any more. Now we've dropped the 'e' and its turned in to an initialism unrelated to the original network related only functionality as others have said.

Im curious what others would call these if they could rename them...

Kernel Plugins?

Kernel Spies?

Advanced observability operators?

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