README.md

About

This is a collection of examples showing the usage of BPF ringbuf and perfbuf APIs. Each example implements a simple tracing tool, collecting all exec() syscalls, which correspond to starting a new processes:

• perfbuf-output uses BPF perfbuf and bpf_perf_event_output() API;
• ringbuf-output uses BPF ringbuf and bpf_ringbuf_output() API, very similar to the one provided by BPF perfbuf;
• ringbuf-reserve-commit shows off a distinct BPF ringbuf's bpf_ringbuf_reserve()/bpf_ringbuf_submit() pair of APIs, which provide better usability and performance, compared to the xxx_output() APIs.

These examples are a companion to the BPF ring buffer blog post.

Building & running

This repo is using libbpf through submodule at libbpf/. It also has a copy of bpftool binary (built fro x86-64 platform), which is used to generate BPF skeleton for .bpf.c files. These examples do not rely on BPF CO-RE and thus there are no extra requirements on Linux kernel, beyond some reasonably recent version for BPF perfbuf version, while BPF ringbuf examples need 5.8+ kernels.

Otherwise, everything is super straightforward:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive       # check out libbpf
$ cd src
$ make
$ sudo ./ringbuf-reserve-commit    # or ./ringbuf-output, or ./perfbuf-output
TIME     EVENT PID     COMM             FILENAME
19:17:39 EXEC  3232062 sh               /bin/sh
19:17:39 EXEC  3232062 timeout          /usr/bin/timeout
19:17:39 EXEC  3232063 ipmitool         /usr/bin/ipmitool
19:17:39 EXEC  3232065 env              /usr/bin/env
19:17:39 EXEC  3232066 env              /usr/bin/env
19:17:39 EXEC  3232065 timeout          /bin/timeout
19:17:39 EXEC  3232066 timeout          /bin/timeout
19:17:39 EXEC  3232067 sh               /bin/sh
19:17:39 EXEC  3232068 sh               /bin/sh
^C