Linux 4.x Tracing: Performance Analysis with bcc/BPF (eBPF)

Talk for SCALE15x (2017) by Brendan Gregg. "BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) has been enhanced in the Linux 4.x series and now powers a large collection of performance analysis and observability tools ready for you to use, included in the bcc (BPF Complier Collection) open source project. BPF nowadays (aka eBPF) can do system tracing, software defined networks, and kernel fast path: much more than just filtering packets! This talk will focus on the bcc/BPF tools for performance analysis, which make use of other built in Linux capabilities: dynamic tracing (kprobes and uprobes) and static tracing (tracepoints and USDT). There are now bcc tools for measuring latency distributions for file system I/O and run queue latency, printing details of storage device I/O and TCP retransmits, investigating blocked stack traces and memory leaks, and a whole lot more. These lead to performance wins large and small, especially when instrumenting areas that previously had zero visibility. Tracing superpowers have finally arrived, built in to Linux."

[RobertGallop]

Thank you Brendan, was just looking for this video Friday :). Really appreciate all your work in being the foremost expert in Linux performance.

[baiwfg]

Many thanks for sharing this. I think it's very necessary to wrap these tools/commands into simpler and easier-used GUI for a majority of developers/users. If I want to profile multiple production servers, I'd rather use web console to filter, aggragate those outputs from different hosts than logining in to every machine and execute those commands by hand.

[ManishSharma-qssv]

Hi Sir,

Can you post more videos as your videos are very very knowledgeable and I am learning a lot ? Please post more videos

[veerendra.k]

Where can I get the presentation file?