Documentary Film “eBPF: Unlocking the Kernel” Reveals the Unfolding Revolution of eBPF

Film is fourth from Speakeasy Productions highlighting the open source technologies that change industry

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Speakeasy Productions announced today at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 the film premiere of “eBPF: Unlocking the Kernel,” the story of eBPF, a powerhouse technology that enables developers to run programs inside the Linux kernel without making changes to the kernel or loading other technology.

eBPF creates the ability to extend the kernel in ways never done before and provides a truly fast, safer path to custom capability. The idea was first introduced in 1993, but eBPF in the last decade has risen from obscurity to be among the most cutting edge technologies in the Linux ecosystem. Today, eBPF is experiencing explosive growth for use cases in security, observability, and networking and has been embraced by giants from Meta to Intel to Red Hat, Isovalent, Microsoft, Netflix, and more.

"When we started as a group of friends to work on eBPF, none of us could have ever imagined that we would unlock a new way of kernel programmability and change the industry forever,” said Thomas Graf, Cilium creator, and CTO and co-founder at Isovalent.

"The documentary reveals the untold story of those early days of eBPF and how this wild vision was accepted into the mainstream kernel. Ten years later, eBPF is a huge ecosystem – and we're still only scratching the surface of what it can do. Imagine solving any performance issue in five days, including accurately evaluating hardware choices: This will make computing faster everywhere, and eBPF is essential for this dream,” said Brendan Gregg, Intel fellow and eBPF pioneer.

"eBPF has proven itself as a game changer for creating a new class of application software across billions of deployments, speeding development and time to market for use cases including system instrumentation and flexible applications, such as networking, security, performance monitoring, observability, profiling, and tracing," said Linux Foundation General Manager of Networking, Edge and IoT Arpit Joshipura. "Telling the story of eBPF through this documentary, from its inception to the impact its having across sectors, will help even more organizations experience the benefits of this revolutionary technology."

“eBPF: Unlocking the Kernel” is the fourth film release from Speakeasy Productions, which is leading the way in using the power of film and storytelling to demystify core open source software projects that have the power to change entire industries. The film tells eBPF’s story from inception, the challenges, and the breakthroughs — all through the words of insiders.

“Film is a powerful medium to help people understand the value of the open source work that goes on behind the scenes, every single day, so that we can all enjoy faster, better, and more powerful technology,” said Chad Torbin, Executive Producer of Speakeasy Productions. “We want to spread the word so that our open source and cloud native communities continue to flourish to create untold value that benefits all of us.”

“eBPF: Unlocking the Kernel” was sponsored by the eBPF Foundation, Isovalent, and Intel. To learn more and view the full documentary, please visit the film website: https://ebpfdocumentary.com

Speakeasy Productions’ other award-winning documentaries include “Inside Envoy: The Proxy for the Future” and “Inside Prometheus: An Open Source System That Changed Technology.” Prior, Speakeasy Productions helped produce a two-part series dedicated to the origin and growth of Kubernetes, the container orchestrator at the heart of the microservices revolution.

About Speakeasy Productions

Speakeasy Productions, a division of international public relations agency Speakeasy Strategies, is on a mission to empower technology companies and open source communities to showcase their stories of the unsung technology heroes who are changing the way we live and work. Through the development and production of documentary films, we aim to demystify core open source projects and the world of back-end developers to move them out of the shadows and forward into the hearts and minds of millions.