October 6 – November 30, 2025Remote, async, open to all skill levels

eBPF Summit 2025: Hackathon Edition

A global open source hackathon to build, explore, and contribute with eBPF.

About the Hackathon

eBPF Summit: Hackathon Edition invites developers, tinkerers, and open source enthusiasts from all backgrounds to get hands-on with this cutting-edge kernel technology that's being used to build the future of cloud native networking, observability, and security.

Connecting Contributors

The hackathon brings together eBPF developers, operators, advocates, and first-time contributors from around the world — to collaborate, build, and learn from each other.

Building in the Open

From early ideas to production-ready tools, this event is about making progress in public — with support, feedback, and community energy.

Expanding Use Cases

Explore how eBPF powers the next generation of security, networking, and observability — and help push its boundaries by trying new integrations, policies, and workflows.

About eBPF Summit

Since 2020, eBPF Summit has gathered the eBPF community together for a virtual summit that explores and celebrates the open source eBPF ecosystem. With everything from deep dives to hands-on challenges, eBPF Summit brings together everyone building, using, or interested in using eBPF as a platform. This year we're doing something different by hosting this eBPF Hackathon!

Read the recap blog post

🥇 And the Winners are... 🥁

Without further ado, let's announce the winning entries from the three Hackathon categories:

eBPF Starter Track for Beginners

SCX_MUS - Mostly Unfair Scheduler

A custom Linux scheduler that uses the sched_ext framework to prioritise containers in Kubernetes. The project provides a simple CLI that selects a container, extracts its cgroup ID and stores it in a BPF map. Judges highlighted how impressive it is to see a group of newcomers tackle such a complex program type: sched_ext is one of the more complicated program types to write … it's a great example of eBPF super‑powers.

View Project on DevPost

Using eBPF Track

xgotop: Realtime Go Runtime Visualizer

A lean but powerful profiler that instruments the Go runtime to visualise goroutines and memory allocations in real time. With sub‑microsecond overhead and a polished UI, xgotop was dubbed pprof on steroids by one judge, who also praised the clear architecture diagrams and demo.

View Project on DevPost

Cilium Technologies Track

Goya

A proof‑of‑concept framework that blends the Rust‑based Aya framework for kernel space with Cilium's Go libraries for user space. It offers a template for developers who want to write eBPF kernel code in Rust, while still benefitting from the ergonomics of Go for their user space code. Judges appreciated the niche appeal: If anyone ever wanted to do Go + Rust, this is a really good starting point.

View Project on DevPost

eCHO Episode 199: Hackathon Recap

Watch the eCHO Episode 199 where judges Constanze b. Roedig and Teodor (Janez) Podobnik share insights into the judging process and showcase the winning projects. We highlight the winners and the best submissions from each track.

Explore the Projects

Submissions for the eBPF Summit 2025: Hackathon Edition are now closed. We received 42 incredible projects across all three tracks showcasing innovation in eBPF and Cilium technologies!

Over the course of four weeks, more than 500 participants from around the world joined the challenge. Explore all the amazing projects in the gallery below!

View Project Gallery Join the Slack

What Participants Say

“
Great experience! The hackathon motivated me to build something real instead of just reading docs.

“
All good, I love the idea this year to do something practical. I would never have done this project otherwise.

“
This hackathon was a great way to explore the Cilium ecosystem. The challenge structure encouraged building something practical, and the documentation and examples were helpful. I enjoyed the open-ended creative format and would love to see more beginner-friendly policy and datapath walkthroughs in future events.

Tracks

Tools & Projects Using eBPF or Contributing to Cilium

Build or enhance tools using eBPF that aren't based on Isovalent projects. Make direct contributions to Cilium, Tetragon, Hubble, or related tooling and docs.