The Unglamorous Work: Hardening an eBPF BNG for Production

A month ago I wrote about building an eBPF-accelerated BNG and the infrastructure repo that lets you run it locally. The response was better than I expected — the post hit 94 points on Hacker News and sparked some good discussion. It also sparked some fair criticism. One commenter called the code “vibe coded.” Another wrote a detailed comment about why distributed BNG has never achieved commercial success, despite attempts by Cisco, Metaswitch, and others. Someone asked about CPU-to-NPU bandwidth in whitebox OLTs. Someone else pointed to 6WIND’s commercial DPDK-based BNG as a more production-ready alternative.