eBPF Is "Widely Adopted" — Every Paper Says So. We Censused 189 Repos to Check
Open any recent eBPF systems paper and the first paragraph will tell you eBPF is "widely adopted." In the 2026-05→08 window alone we counted seven cs.OS papers (an access-control system, a typed DSL, a verifier-diagnostics study, an OS policy plane, a compiler extension, an io_uring tracer, a page-cache eviction policy) — and every one of them asserted widespread adoption in its introduction.…
Despite numerous recent papers claiming that eBPF is widely adopted, a census of 189 top-starred open-source repositories found that only 3.4% actually embed and compile their own eBPF programs. The remaining 96.6% merely depend on software containing eBPF. Only 12 projects were found to actually embed eBPF, all of which are part of the anchor ecosystem consisting of projects like Cilium, BCC, bpftrace, Falco, Katran, Calico, Tetragon, aya, libbpf and others.
The census also revealed that the majority of these embeddings are for tracing and observability purposes, rather than for networking. Kubernetes, which is classified as a user rather than an embedder, adds eBPF support without shipping its own programs. The study confirms that eBPF adoption is not a general fact, but rather an ecosystem fact specific to the anchor ecosystem.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
