BPF: The Forgotten Bytecode
We used BPF at Arbor Networks as a medium for signatures for DDoS attacks (other tools in our stack automatically generated them from statistical models), and I spent a pretty big chunk of my first year there working on ways to optimize evaluation of lots of BPF filters on NetFlow records in parallel.<p>The BPF virtual machine itself is trivial; any competent systems programmer given its specification should have no trouble implementing it.<p>What's most interesting about BPF is libpcap. There is a surprising amount of compiler theory baked into pcap, and it bears by far the larger share of the weight in making Unix packet capture applications workable and efficient (this may have changed with JIT'd BPF). I actually found this frustrating, as simple changes to the BPF VM (for instance, "vectorized" comparisons to support multiple filters) would break the libpcap optimizer.<p>I confess to being a bit baffled as to why things like seccomp-bpf would choose to use such a simple bytecode scheme; network packet captures uses it because of tradition and compatibility, and because a competently-designed high level filter language compiler supports only BPF.