Building Linux eBPF/XDP apps on macOS (Apple Silicon)

I spend a lot of time building high-performance DNS filters and network tools in Go. My primary development machine is an Apple Silicon Mac, but all the production deployments target Linux/AMD64 servers.

Recently, I started heavily integrating eBPF and XDP to drop abusive traffic (like random subdomain attacks) before it even hits the Go networking stack. However, compiling C eBPF code locally on macOS has always been a pain due to the missing Linux headers and the architectural differences...

I wrote down the exact step-by-step process, including a workaround for the notorious Debian multiarch header issue (asm/types.h) and a neat little smoke test using bpftool inside the container..:

https://openbld.net/blog/build-xdp-ebpf-macos-guide/