In its current form, OpenFlow, the de facto implementation\ud of SDN, separates the network’s control and data\ud planes allowing a central controller to alter the matchaction\ud pipeline using a limited set of fields and actions.\ud To support new protocols, forwarding logic, telemetry,\ud monitoring or even middlebox-like functions the currently\ud available programmability in SDN is insufficient.\ud In this paper, we introduce BPFabric, a platform, protocol,\ud and language-independent architecture to centrally\ud program and monitor the data plane. BPFabric leverages\ud eBPF, a platform and protocol independent instruction\ud set to define the packet processing and forwarding functionality\ud of the data plane. We introduce a control plane\ud API that allows data plane functions to be deployed onthe-fly,\ud reporting events of interest and exposing network\ud internal state.\ud We present a raw socket and DPDK implementation\ud of the design, the former for large-scale experimentation\ud using environment such as Mininet and the latter for\ud high-performance low-latency deployments. We show\ud through examples that functions unrealisable in OpenFlow\ud can leverage this flexibility while achieving similar\ud or better performance to today’s static design.