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Writing BPF Tools: From BCC GitHub Issues

In this lab, you will have the opportunity to contribute to BCC development by building tools or taking care of other issues brought up on the project's GitHub repository. The list of issues below is occasionally updated, but some issues might already be closed or reassigned.

Each task has a rough time estimate attached to it, where:

  • Short means it's probably possible to finish the task in under an hour.
  • Medium means the task requires some design and planning, and will probably take a couple of days to complete.
  • Open-Ended means the task requires design, planning, collaboration, and a lot of development work, and will probably take more than a few days to complete.

NOTE: This list was last updated in October 2016. Some of the tasks below could be closed or addressed already. Please make sure to ask before starting to work on any of them, especially if you are reading this more than a month or two after the last update.

Tool Development Tasks

Update all tools that take a command-line pid or tid argument and that print a pid or tid to make it clear what is being printed. The bpf_get_current_pid_tgid() helper returns 64 bits, the lower 32 bits being the tid (task->pid). A lot of tools that should really match, filter, or print the pid (task->tgid) use this value instead.

There are still a couple of tools remaining that print to the trace pipe, which is shared with other Linux tools. Replace any remaining usages of the trace pipe with the BPF_PERF_OUTPUT mechanism and move the old versions of the tools to old/.

This expands on the lockstat lab to build a full contention monitoring tool with wait graph support.

There are some tools like stackcount and funclatency that support multiple functions at once by having a wildcard or regex specifier. This can be useful for trace as well, e.g. trace t:block:* or trace u:pthread:*mutex*.

The tool contribution guidelines require running pep8 and fixing style issues. There are some tools that got a bit neglected over time and have some issues that pep8 detects.

Essentially, once stack tracing was introduced in trace, there's no longer need for stacksnoop. To retain compatibility and discoverability, we can turn stacksnoop into a wrapper that invokes trace with the appropriate flags.

Bring opensnoop up to par with an older version that uses ftrace.

Documentation Tasks

Update the tools' man pages to reflect which minimum kernel version is required to run the tool. Notably, tools that rely on perf output buffers require kernel 4.4, tools that rely on stack tracing require kernel 4.6, and tools that rely on BPF support for tracepoints require kernel 4.7.

Add a collection of links, presentations, blog posts and so on referencing the core BCC project.

  • Testing on a New Distribution Medium

Find a distribution that isn't covered by the installation requirements, and see if you can get BCC to compile from source on that platform. Document your findings as a PR to the INSTALL.md file or as a separate file linked from INSTALL.md.

Core Development Tasks

Explore building a higher-level language (such as DTrace's language) for expressing BPF probes.