Open Test Harness Exposes Behavioral Gaps Between Native and Generic XDP Modes
A developer has released an open-source differential test harness designed to compare how the same BPF program behaves under native XDP and generic SKB-mode XDP on Linux 6.8. The tool uses a fixed eleven-packet test corpus and a comparison script to detect differences in frame bytes and XDP verdicts such as PASS, DROP, TX, or REDIRECT. The release addresses a practical operational risk: firewalls or rate-limiters validated under native XDP can silently fall back to generic mode on unsupported drivers or veth ports, potentially changing behavior without any clear error. A divergence taxonomy classifying differences into three classes is included alongside a reproducible virtio/veth smoke-test baseline. This is the first of two posts, with the current release focused on the virtio_vm profile; bare-metal and physical NIC results are planned for a follow-up.
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