Build from sources

This document describes the process to build bpfilter from sources. While bpfilter can be built on most systems, a recent (6.6+) Linux kernel is required with libbpf 1.2+ to run the bpfilter daemon. bpfilter officially supports Fedora 40+, CentOS Stream 9+, and Ubuntu 24.04+.

If you want to perform a full build of bpfilter (including all test tests, code check, benchmarks, and documentation), the following dependencies are required:

# Fedora 40+
sudo dnf -y install \
    autoconf \
    automake \
    gawk \
    bpftool \
    bison \
    clang \
    clang-tools-extra \
    cmake \
    doxygen \
    flex \
    gcc \
    gcc-c++ \
    git-core \
    google-benchmark-devel \
    iproute \
    iputils \
    jq \
    lcov \
    libbpf-devel \
    libcmocka-devel \
    libgit2-devel \
    libnl3-devel \
    libtool \
    procps-ng \
    python3-breathe \
    python3-dateutil \
    python3-furo \
    python3-GitPython \
    python3-linuxdoc \
    python3-scapy \
    python3-sphinx \
    sed \
    xxd

# Ubuntu 24.04+
sudo apt-get install -y \
    autoconf \
    automake \
    bison \
    clang \
    clang-tidy \
    clang-format \
    cmake \
    doxygen \
    flex \
    furo \
    g++ \
    git \
    iproute2 \
    iputils-ping \
    lcov \
    libbenchmark-dev \
    libbpf-dev \
    libc-dev \
    libcmocka-dev \
    libgit2-dev \
    libnl-3-dev \
    libtool \
    linux-tools-common \
    make \
    pkgconf \
    procps \
    python3-breathe \
    python3-dateutil \
    python3-git \
    python3-pip \
    python3-scapy \
    python3-sphinx \
    sed \
    xxd

You can then use CMake to generate the build system:

cmake -S $BPFILTER_SOURCE -B $BUILD_DIRECTORY

The usual CMake options are allowed (e.g. CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE, CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX…). The build configuration is modular, so you’re free to enable/disable some parts of the projects according to your needs:

• -DNO_DOCS: disable the documentation, including the coverage and benchmarks report.

• -DNO_TESTS: disable unit tests, end-to-end tests, and integration tests.

• -DNO_CHECKS: disable style check and static analyzer.

• -DNO_BENCHMARKS: disable benchmarks.

A full configuration (without any part disabled) will provide the following targets:

• core, bpfilter, libbpfilter, bfcli: the bpfilter binaries.

• test: run all the tests. This command will run unit, e2e and build targets. See Tests for more information.

• check: run clang-tidy and clang-format against the source files.

• benchmarks: run the benchmarks on bpfilter.

The build artifacts are located in $BUILD_DIRECTORY/output.