commit | 69e361ac66fbf3baadb1f7cf21762df61ad7a5a9 | [log] [tgz] |
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author | Sasha Goldshtein <goldshtn@gmail.com> | Tue Sep 27 19:40:00 2016 +0300 |
committer | 4ast <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> | Tue Sep 27 09:40:00 2016 -0700 |
tree | d1bbb66e09bea8abb94b8016af07366cbb544736 | |
parent | 664418624527fffcda7c06bee6fbe6099cbaccb4 [diff] |
Fix argdist, trace, tplist to use the libbcc USDT support (#698) * Allow argdist to enable USDT probes without a pid The current code would only pass the pid to the USDT class, thereby not allowing USDT probes to be enabled from the binary path only. If the probe doesn't have a semaphore, it can actually be enabled for all processes in a uniform fashion -- which is now supported. * Reintroduce USDT support into tplist To print USDT probe information, tplist needs an API to return the probe data, including the number of arguments and locations for each probe. This commit introduces this API, called bcc_usdt_foreach, and invokes it from the revised tplist implementation. Although the result is not 100% identical to the original tplist, which could also print the probe argument information, this is not strictly required for users of the argdist and trace tools, which is why it was omitted for now. * Fix trace.py tracepoint support Somehow, the import of the Perf class was omitted from tracepoint.py, which would cause failures when trace enables kernel tracepoints. * trace: Native bcc USDT support trace now works again by using the new bcc USDT support instead of the home-grown Python USDT parser. This required an additional change in the BPF Python API to allow multiple USDT context objects to be passed to the constructor in order to support multiple USDT probes in a single invocation of trace. Otherwise, the USDT-related code in trace was greatly simplified, and uses the `bpf_usdt_readarg` macros to obtain probe argument values. One minor inconvenience that was introduced in the bcc USDT API is that USDT probes with multiple locations that reside in a shared object *must* have a pid specified to enable, even if they don't have an associated semaphore. The reason is that the bcc USDT code figures out which location invoked the probe by inspecting `ctx->ip`, which, for shared objects, can only be determined when the specific process context is available to figure out where the shared object was loaded. This limitation did not previously exist, because instead of looking at `ctx->ip`, the Python USDT reader generated separate code for each probe location with an incrementing identifier. It's not a very big deal because it only means that some probes can't be enabled without specifying a process id, which is almost always desired anyway for USDT probes. argdist has not yet been retrofitted with support for multiple USDT probes, and needs to be updated in a separate commit. * argdist: Support multiple USDT probes argdist now supports multiple USDT probes, as it did before the transition to the native bcc USDT support. This requires aggregating the USDT objects from each probe and passing them together to the BPF constructor when the probes are initialized and attached. Also add a more descriptive exception message to the USDT class when it fails to enable a probe.
BCC is a toolkit for creating efficient kernel tracing and manipulation programs, and includes several useful tools and examples. It makes use of extended BPF (Berkeley Packet Filters), formally known as eBPF, a new feature that was first added to Linux 3.15. Much of what BCC uses requires Linux 4.1 and above.
eBPF was described by Ingo Molnár as:
One of the more interesting features in this cycle is the ability to attach eBPF programs (user-defined, sandboxed bytecode executed by the kernel) to kprobes. This allows user-defined instrumentation on a live kernel image that can never crash, hang or interfere with the kernel negatively.
BCC makes BPF programs easier to write, with kernel instrumentation in C (and includes a C wrapper around LLVM), and front-ends in Python and lua. It is suited for many tasks, including performance analysis and network traffic control.
This example traces a disk I/O kernel function, and populates an in-kernel power-of-2 histogram of the I/O size. For efficiency, only the histogram summary is returned to user-level.
# ./bitehist.py Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C kbytes : count distribution 0 -> 1 : 3 | | 2 -> 3 : 0 | | 4 -> 7 : 211 |********** | 8 -> 15 : 0 | | 16 -> 31 : 0 | | 32 -> 63 : 0 | | 64 -> 127 : 1 | | 128 -> 255 : 800 |**************************************|
The above output shows a bimodal distribution, where the largest mode of 800 I/O was between 128 and 255 Kbytes in size.
See the source: bitehist.py. What this traces, what this stores, and how the data is presented, can be entirely customized. This shows only some of many possible capabilities.
See INSTALL.md for installation steps on your platform.
See FAQ.txt for the most common troubleshoot questions.
Some of these are single files that contain both C and Python, others have a pair of .c and .py files, and some are directories of files.
Examples:
Examples:
BPF guarantees that the programs loaded into the kernel cannot crash, and cannot run forever, but yet BPF is general purpose enough to perform many arbitrary types of computation. Currently, it is possible to write a program in C that will compile into a valid BPF program, yet it is vastly easier to write a C program that will compile into invalid BPF (C is like that). The user won't know until trying to run the program whether it was valid or not.
With a BPF-specific frontend, one should be able to write in a language and receive feedback from the compiler on the validity as it pertains to a BPF backend. This toolkit aims to provide a frontend that can only create valid BPF programs while still harnessing its full flexibility.
Furthermore, current integrations with BPF have a kludgy workflow, sometimes involving compiling directly in a linux kernel source tree. This toolchain aims to minimize the time that a developer spends getting BPF compiled, and instead focus on the applications that can be written and the problems that can be solved with BPF.
The features of this toolkit include:
In the future, more bindings besides python will likely be supported. Feel free to add support for the language of your choice and send a pull request!
At Red Hat Summit 2015, BCC was presented as part of a session on BPF. A multi-host vxlan environment is simulated and a BPF program used to monitor one of the physical interfaces. The BPF program keeps statistics on the inner and outer IP addresses traversing the interface, and the userspace component turns those statistics into a graph showing the traffic distribution at multiple granularities. See the code here.
Already pumped up to commit some code? Here are some resources to join the discussions in the IOVisor community and see what you want to work on.