BPF at Facebook and beyond
> Facebook, he began, has an upstream-first philosophy, taken to an extreme; the company tries not to carry any out-of-tree patches at all. All work done at Facebook is meant to go upstream as soon as it practically can. The company also runs recent kernels, upgrading whenever possible.<p>I was chatting to a Facebook engineer on their use of BPF this summer and heard the same thing, which was surprising to me. There seem to be a number of companies that take advantage of Linux being licensed under GPL and keep their own forks/patches of the kernel that they use internally (anecdotally, I’ve heard Google does this), and the they stay on some old version, which apparently Facebook doesn’t do.