The state of eBPF docs

eBPF is a big and complicated topic. For years it was common that the people using and writing eBPF programs were also the people involved in the development of eBPF. Those days are somewhat behind us now, eBPF is more popular than ever, and the number of non-kernel experts wanting to use eBPF is growing rapidly.

A lot of new people means a lot of learning to be done. There is a small but strong community of people to talk to, if you know how to find them. The internet is full of outdated articles that have aged like milk. The kernel has docs for a handful of subjects and man pages that are correct for some kernel versions but not others.

I started the eBPF docs project about two years ago out of frustration for the lack of comprehensive documentation. These docs are now hosted at docs.ebpf.io. Lets take a look at the state of these docs, what it took to get here and where they are going next.