bpfman Overview

Core bpfman is a library written in Rust and published as a Crate via crates.io. The bpfman library leverages the aya library to manage eBPF programs. Applications written in Rust can import the bpfman library and call the bpfman APIs directly. An example of a Rust based application leveraging the bpfman library is the bpfman CLI, which is a Rust based binary used to provision bpfman from a Linux command prompt (see CLI Guide).

For applications written in other languages, bpfman provides bpfman-rpc, a Rust based bpfman RPC server binary. Non-Rust applications can send a RPC message to the server, which translate the RPC request into a bpfman library call. The long term solution is to leverage the Rust Foreign Function Interface (FFI) feature, which enables a different (foreign) programming language to call Rust functions, but that is not supported at the moment.

The bpfman-rpc server can run in one of two modes. It can be run as a long running process or as a systemd service that uses socket activation to start bpfman-rpc only when there is a RPC message to process. More details are provided in Deploying Example eBPF Programs On Local Host.

When deploying bpfman in a Kubernetes deployment, bpfman-agent, bpfman-rpc, and the bpfman library are packaged in a container. When the container starts, bpfman-rpc is started as a long running process. bpfman-agent listens to the KubeAPI Server and send RPC requests to bpfman-rpc, which in turn calls the bpfman library to manage eBPF programs on a given node.

More details provided in Deploying Example eBPF Programs On Kubernetes.