Re: [PATCH RFC 0/4] net: add bpfilter

On 19 February 2018 at 16:36, David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

In my opinion, any resistence to integration with eBPF and XDP will
lead to even less adoption of netfilter as a technology.

Therefore my plan is to move everything to be integrated around these
important core technologies.  For the purposes of integration, code
coverage, performance, and the ability to juxtapose different bits of
eBPF code into larger optimized code streams that can also be
offloaded into hardware.

Thanks for sharing your plans. I'll share mine.

Debian already recommends using nftables rather than iptables.
Probably in the next release cycle we (Debian) will give even more
prominence to nftables by linking iptables to iptables-compat, as an
opt-in for users, so we don't break systems.
By the next-next release cycle (4+ years or so?) we will probably have
enough confidence with compat/translation tools that Debian could
fully wipe the old iptables binary to use just the nftables framework.
Same for ip6tables, arptables, ebtables.

Does this sound reasonable to you?

Yes, probably major datacenters (google? facebook?, amazon?) they
don't even care about what Debian is doing, since they are crafting
their own distro anyway.
But there are *a lot* of other people that do care about these migration plans.