BPF meaning in Networking ?
Answer: What is Berkeley Packet Filter mean?
The Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) is a technology used in certain computer operating systems for programs that need to, among other things, analyze network traffic (and eBPF is an extended BPF JIT virtual machine in the Linux kernel). It provides a raw interface to data link layers, permitting raw link-layer packets to be sent and received. BPF is available on most Unix-like operating systems and eBPF for Linux and for Microsoft Windows. In addition, if the driver for the network interface supports promiscuous mode, it allows the interface to be put into that mode so that all packets on the network can be received, even those destined to other hosts.
BPF supports filtering packets, allowing a userspace process to supply a filter program that specifies which packets it wants to receive. For example, a tcpdump process may want to receive only packets that initiate a TCP connection. BPF returns only packets that pass the filter that the process supplies. This avoids copying unwanted packets from the operating system kernel to the process, greatly improving performance.
BPF is sometimes used to refer to just the filtering mechanism, rather than to the entire interface. Some systems, such as Linux and Tru64 UNIX, provide a raw interface to the data link layer other than the BPF raw interface but use the BPF filtering mechanisms for that raw interface.
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