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eBPF Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s fund for eBPF itself: member companies pay for research grants, fellowships, events and security work, and a steering committee of kernel maintainers sets direction. Since October 2025 it hosts no projects of its own.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux FoundationWebsite

What it is

The eBPF Foundation is part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. The LF announced it on August 12, 2021, with Facebook (now Meta), Google, Isovalent, Microsoft and Netflix as founding members, as a home for eBPF projects and the community around them. Formally it is a “directed fund”: its charter’s first line gives it the job to “raise, budget and spend funds in support of the eBPF community”. The money goes to academic research grants, a community and advocacy fellowship, meetups, case studies and security audits. Members must also be corporate members of the LF. In October 2026 the foundation listed five Platinum members, CrowdStrike, Google, Isovalent, Meta and Netflix, and three Silver members, Datadog, Intel and Toyota.

It no longer hosts projects. Its steering committee drafted a process for accepting technical projects in 2022, but in September 2025 the committee and the board voted to drop it, and the charter amended on October 8, 2025 removed technical projects altogether: the foundation is “just focused on the upstream eBPF project”, whose code lives in the Linux kernel. The page of projects on its website is a landscape of the wider ecosystem, not a list of hosted ones.

For someone choosing a technology, the badge here marks eBPF itself, not the tools built on it. Cilium, Falco, Inspektor Gadget, bpfman and LoxiLB are CNCF projects; L3AF is an incubating project of LF Networking; bcc and bpftrace have their own GitHub organisations; libbpf is developed in the kernel; and eBPF for Windows belongs to Microsoft. There are no maturity stages.

Its projects in this catalog

eBPFOpen sourceThe foundation funds and promotes eBPF; the code is developed upstream in the Linux kernelA small virtual machine inside the Linux kernel: programs are checked by a verifier, compiled to machine code and attached to kernel or app events, so tracing, networking and security tools run in the kernel without kernel modules.

In depth

Who decides#

The Governing Board runs the fund. Each Platinum member appoints a representative, and the Silver members elect one for every five of them, up to three and never fewer than one; no company may have more than two representatives. The board approves the budget, elects officers and handles business and legal matters, and its meetings are private unless it decides otherwise. Since July 2026 its chair has been Bill Mulligan of Isovalent, part of Cisco, and its treasurer Anjali Kanak of Netflix. The LF keeps 9% of the first $1 million raised each year, and 6% above that, for administration.

Technical direction belongs to the eBPF Steering Committee (BSC), made up of maintainers from the Linux kernel, eBPF runtimes and eBPF projects, with no more than two from any one company. It coordinates work across the community, sets a technical vision and proposes priorities for events, travel funds and other spending to the board. In October 2026 it had six members: Alexei Starovoitov (Meta), Daniel Borkmann and Joe Stringer (both Isovalent), KP Singh (Google), Brendan Gregg (Intel) and Alan Jowett (Microsoft). The first five have served since October 13, 2021. New members need a two-thirds vote of the whole BSC, which meets about every two weeks and publishes its minutes on GitHub.

Where the money goes#

Academic research grants

$100,000 in 2026

In September 2026 the foundation gave two $50,000 grants, from 29 proposals by 23 universities: to Virginia Tech for a tool that explains verifier errors with source-level fixes, and to the University of British Columbia for observing virtual machines securely from outside the guest.

Community and advocacy fellowship

2026

Pays people to grow the community through talks, podcasts and meetups. The first fellowship ended in May 2026, and the 2026 recipients were announced on October 15.

Case studies and landscape

2026

Write-ups of how members and users run eBPF, such as Google’s pluggable CPU schedulers and lock-contention analysis and Cloudflare’s networking and security, plus a landscape of companies building on eBPF published in July 2026.

Where it came from2021–2026

By 2021 eBPF had grown from a kernel feature into the base of many networking, tracing and security tools, and Microsoft had started porting it to Windows. Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft and Netflix set up the eBPF Foundation at the Linux Foundation that August, announcing it a week before the eBPF Summit, to be “the home for open source eBPF projects and technologies”. The first members of its steering committee, mostly kernel BPF maintainers, took their seats that October.

In June 2022 the committee drafted a process for projects to join, and the charter as amended in February 2024 defined technical projects by a project progression policy. In September 2025 the committee and the board voted to drop the idea: the charter amended on October 8, 2025 says the fund supports the eBPF ecosystem, and the foundation focuses on upstream eBPF.

Since then it has spent its money on research grants, a fellowship, meetups and case studies. In July 2026 it announced Meta as a Platinum and Toyota as a Silver member, along with a new board chair and treasurer.

Why it’s built this way

A fund around kernel code, not a host for its code
eBPF itself is developed in the Linux kernel by its maintainers, so the foundation was set up as a directed fund that pays for community work, with the kernel’s BPF maintainers on its steering committee.
No projects of its own
The change approved in 2025 says the foundation “is just focused on the upstream eBPF project and will not have any Technical Projects”. By then the best-known projects built on eBPF, such as Cilium and Falco, had a home in the CNCF.
No more than two seats per company
The charter limits each company to two board representatives and two BSC members, so a single vendor can’t steer the community.

Timeline

  1. 2021

    eBPF Foundation announced on August 12; steering committee seated on October 13

  2. 2022

    First draft of a process for hosting technical projects, in June

  3. 2024

    Charter amended in February

  4. 2025

    BSC and board vote to stop accepting projects; charter amended on October 8

  5. 2026

    Meta and Toyota join in July; $100,000 in research grants in September

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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