How to Develop BPF Tools with libbpf + BPF CO-RE

Distributed clusters​ might encounter performance problems or unpredictable failures, especially when they are running in the cloud​. Of all the kinds of failures, kernel failures may be the most difficult to analyze and simulate.

Based on Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF), BCC​ (BPF Compiler Collection) offers many useful resources to construct effective kernel tracing and manipulation programs but it might cause inconveniences for developers in certain situations. Compared with BCC, libbpf + BPF CO-RE seems a better solution because it greatly reduces storage space and runtime overhead, which enables BPF to support more hardware environments, and it optimizes programmers’ development experience.

In this talk, Wenbo Zhang will share his BPF practices on how to develop BPF tools with libbpf + BPF CO-RE. He will introduce the advantages of this development method, how to use this method to develop tools, and some tips and tricks for writing Linux BPF applications with libbpf.

Speaker: Wenbo Zhang – PingCAP