libbpf

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2750 stars · 502 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

libbpf is the official stand-alone C library for loading and managing BPF programs and maps on Linux, developed upstream in the bpf-next kernel tree and mirrored to GitHub. The ecosystem includes libbpf-bootstrap for example BPF applications and libbpf-rs, a safe idiomatic Rust wrapper around libbpf.

Use cases

• write eBPF programs that trace kernel and user-space events
• load and manage BPF objects from a C application
• build CO-RE (compile once, run everywhere) BPF applications
• develop custom Linux observability and tracing tools
• write eBPF tooling in Rust with a safe API
• instrument networking, security, or performance monitoring via BPF

When to choose

• you need low-level, kernel-synced BPF loading APIs on Linux
• you want CO-RE portability for BPF programs across kernel versions
• you are building tracing or observability tools like bpftrace-style utilities
• you want a safe Rust interface to eBPF via libbpf-rs

When to avoid

• you need BPF on non-Linux platforms
• you want a high-level scripting tool rather than a library (consider bpftrace or BCC)
• you need Windows eBPF support

Facets

library · maturity stable

tracing developer-tools sdk developer-tools operating-systems performance monitoring c rust cli bpf ebpf libbpf kernel observability co-re bpf-rs linux

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