libelf is an internal dependency of libbpf and thus it is required to link against and must be installed on the system for applications to work. pkg-config is used by default to find libelf, and the program called can be overridden with PKG_CONFIG
.
If using pkg-config
at build time is not desired, it can be disabled by setting NO_PKG_CONFIG=1
when calling make.
To build both static libbpf.a and shared libbpf.so:
$ cd src
$ make
To build only static libbpf.a library in directory build/ and install them together with libbpf headers in a staging directory root/:
$ cd src $ mkdir build root $ BUILD_STATIC_ONLY=y OBJDIR=build DESTDIR=root make install
To build both static libbpf.a and shared libbpf.so against a custom libelf dependency installed in /build/root/ and install them together with libbpf headers in a build directory /build/root/:
$ cd src $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/build/root/lib64/pkgconfig DESTDIR=/build/root make install
Libbpf supports building BPF CO-RE-enabled applications, which, in contrast to BCC, do not require Clang/LLVM runtime being deployed to target servers and doesn't rely on kernel-devel headers being available.
It does rely on kernel to be built with BTF type information, though. Some major Linux distributions come with kernel BTF already built in:
If your kernel doesn't come with BTF built-in, you'll need to build custom kernel. You'll need:
pahole
1.16+ tool (part of dwarves
package), which performs DWARF to BTF conversion;CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF=y
option;/sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux
file:$ ls -la /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux -r--r--r--. 1 root root 3541561 Jun 2 18:16 /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux
To develop and build BPF programs, you'll need Clang/LLVM 10+. The following distributions have Clang/LLVM 10+ packaged by default:
Otherwise, please make sure to update it on your system.
The following resources are useful to understand what BPF CO-RE is and how to use it:
Distributions packaging libbpf from this mirror:
Benefits of packaging from the mirror over packaging from kernel sources:
Package dependencies of libbpf, package names may vary across distros:
This work is dual-licensed under BSD 2-clause license and GNU LGPL v2.1 license. You can choose between one of them if you use this work.
SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause OR LGPL-2.1