DevOps Articles

Turbocharging Host Workloads with Calico eBPF and XDP

In Linux, network-based applications rely on the kernel’s networking stack to establish communication with other systems. https://link.tigera.io/ufol2 (eXpress Data Path) is an eBPF-based high-performance datapath inside the Linux kernel that allows you to bypass the kernel’s networking stack and directly handle packets at the network driver level.

This can greatly reduce overhead, improve overall system performance and improve network-based applications by shortcutting the normal networking path of ordinary traffic.

HEPs can be associated with host network cards and allow you to apply network security policies to the traffic generated by the workload on the host.

By default, networking in Linux is stateless, meaning that each incoming and outgoing traffic flow must be specified before it can be processed by the system networking stack.