> Is my understanding correct, that this is a GCC port that can target eBPF? Yes. Though before a LLVM based eBPF target was available, so this adds the option

> Is my understanding correct, that this is a GCC port that can target eBPF? Yes. Though before a LLVM based eBPF target was available, so this adds the option to use GCC instead. So in principle you could use GFortran to write kernel code; ... profit! > If so, is there any particular purpose in that, beyond making eBPF an easier place for people to write userspace software that would otherwise be kernel modules? eBPF is an in-kernel virtual machine, with JIT for popular architectures like x86-64 (maybe arm64 and ppc64le too, not sure?). So you use GCC (or LLVM) to compile code into an eBPF compatible object format, load it into the kernel (with a special syscall IIRC, or maybe it was something netlink-based?), then an in-kernel verifier checks that it doesn't do anything that isn't allowed before it's enabled. So what can you do with it. Quite a lot, it seems (disclaimer I haven't used it personally). The big use cases at the moment seem to be - network filtering - seccomp filtering (that is, check syscall arguments) - tracing (see bcc/bpftrace) for performance analysis