1675c13fae
Introduce bpf_arena, which is a sparse shared memory region between the bpf program and user space. Use cases: 1. User space mmap-s bpf_arena and uses it as a traditional mmap-ed anonymous region, like memcached or any key/value storage. The bpf program implements an in-kernel accelerator. XDP prog can search for a key in bpf_arena and return a value without going to user space. 2. The bpf program builds arbitrary data structures in bpf_arena (hash tables, rb-trees, sparse arrays), while user space consumes it. 3. bpf_arena is a "heap" of memory from the bpf program's point of view. The user space may mmap it, but bpf program will not convert pointers to user base at run-time to improve bpf program speed. Initially, the kernel vm_area and user vma are not populated. User space can fault in pages within the range. While servicing a page fault, bpf_arena logic will insert a new page into the kernel and user vmas. The bpf program can allocate pages from that region via bpf_arena_alloc_pages(). This kernel function will insert pages into the kernel vm_area. The subsequent fault-in from user space will populate that page into the user vma. The BPF_F_SEGV_ON_FAULT flag at arena creation time can be used to prevent fault-in from user space. In such a case, if a page is not allocated by the bpf program and not present in the kernel vm_area, the user process will segfault. This is useful for use cases 2 and 3 above. bpf_arena_alloc_pages() is similar to user space mmap(). It allocates pages either at a specific address within the arena or allocates a range with the maple tree. bpf_arena_free_pages() is analogous to munmap(), which frees pages and removes the range from the kernel vm_area and from user process vmas. bpf_arena can be used as a bpf program "heap" of up to 4GB. The speed of bpf program is more important than ease of sharing with user space. This is use case 3. In such a case, the BPF_F_NO_USER_CONV flag is recommended. It will tell the verifier to treat the rX = bpf_arena_cast_user(rY) instruction as a 32-bit move wX = wY, which will improve bpf prog performance. Otherwise, bpf_arena_cast_user is translated by JIT to conditionally add the upper 32 bits of user vm_start (if the pointer is not NULL) to arena pointers before they are stored into memory. This way, user space sees them as valid 64-bit pointers. Diff https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/84410 enables LLVM BPF backend generate the bpf_addr_space_cast() instruction to cast pointers between address_space(1) which is reserved for bpf_arena pointers and default address space zero. All arena pointers in a bpf program written in C language are tagged as __attribute__((address_space(1))). Hence, clang provides helpful diagnostics when pointers cross address space. Libbpf and the kernel support only address_space == 1. All other address space identifiers are reserved. rX = bpf_addr_space_cast(rY, /* dst_as */ 1, /* src_as */ 0) tells the verifier that rX->type = PTR_TO_ARENA. Any further operations on PTR_TO_ARENA register have to be in the 32-bit domain. The verifier will mark load/store through PTR_TO_ARENA with PROBE_MEM32. JIT will generate them as kern_vm_start + 32bit_addr memory accesses. The behavior is similar to copy_from_kernel_nofault() except that no address checks are necessary. The address is guaranteed to be in the 4GB range. If the page is not present, the destination register is zeroed on read, and the operation is ignored on write. rX = bpf_addr_space_cast(rY, 0, 1) tells the verifier that rX->type = unknown scalar. If arena->map_flags has BPF_F_NO_USER_CONV set, then the verifier converts such cast instructions to mov32. Otherwise, JIT will emit native code equivalent to: rX = (u32)rY; if (rY) rX |= clear_lo32_bits(arena->user_vm_start); /* replace hi32 bits in rX */ After such conversion, the pointer becomes a valid user pointer within bpf_arena range. The user process can access data structures created in bpf_arena without any additional computations. For example, a linked list built by a bpf program can be walked natively by user space. Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Barret Rhoden <brho@google.com> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20240308010812.89848-2-alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com
libbpf
This is the official home of the libbpf library.
Please use this Github repository for building and packaging libbpf and when using it in your projects through Git submodule.
Libbpf authoritative source code is developed as part of bpf-next Linux source
tree under
tools/lib/bpf subdirectory and is periodically synced to Github. As such, all the
libbpf changes should be sent to BPF mailing list,
please don't open PRs here unless you are changing Github-specific parts of libbpf
(e.g., Github-specific Makefile).
Libbpf and general BPF usage questions
Libbpf documentation can be found here. It's an ongoing effort and has ways to go, but please take a look and consider contributing as well.
Please check out libbpf-bootstrap and the companion blog post for the examples of building BPF applications with libbpf. libbpf-tools are also a good source of the real-world libbpf-based tracing tools.
See also "BPF CO-RE reference guide" for the coverage of practical aspects of building BPF CO-RE applications and "BPF CO-RE" for general introduction into BPF portability issues and BPF CO-RE origins.
All general BPF questions, including kernel functionality, libbpf APIs and their application, should be sent to bpf@vger.kernel.org mailing list. You can subscribe to it here and search its archive here. Please search the archive before asking new questions. It very well might be that this was already addressed or answered before.
bpf@vger.kernel.org is monitored by many more people and they will happily try to help you with whatever issue you have. This repository's PRs and issues should be opened only for dealing with issues pertaining to specific way this libbpf mirror repo is set up and organized.
Building libbpf
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
BPF CO-RE (Compile Once – Run Everywhere)
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:
- Fedora 31+
- RHEL 8.2+
- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (in the next release, as of 2020-06-04)
- Arch Linux (from kernel 5.7.1.arch1-1)
- Manjaro (from kernel 5.4 if compiled after 2021-06-18)
- Ubuntu 20.10
- Debian 11 (amd64/arm64)
If your kernel doesn't come with BTF built-in, you'll need to build custom kernel. You'll need:
pahole1.16+ tool (part ofdwarvespackage), which performs DWARF to BTF conversion;- kernel built with
CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF=yoption; - you can check if your kernel has BTF built-in by looking for
/sys/kernel/btf/vmlinuxfile:
$ 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:
- Fedora 32+
- Ubuntu 20.04+
- Arch Linux
- Ubuntu 20.10 (LLVM 11)
- Debian 11 (LLVM 11)
- Alpine 3.13+
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:
- BPF CO-RE reference guide
- BPF Portability and CO-RE
- HOWTO: BCC to libbpf conversion
- libbpf-tools in BCC repo contain lots of real-world tools converted from BCC to BPF CO-RE. Consider converting some more to both contribute to the BPF community and gain some more experience with it.
Distributions
Distributions packaging libbpf from this mirror:
Benefits of packaging from the mirror over packaging from kernel sources:
- Consistent versioning across distributions.
- No ties to any specific kernel, transparent handling of older kernels. Libbpf is designed to be kernel-agnostic and work across multitude of kernel versions. It has built-in mechanisms to gracefully handle older kernels, that are missing some of the features, by working around or gracefully degrading functionality. Thus libbpf is not tied to a specific kernel version and can/should be packaged and versioned independently.
- Continuous integration testing via GitHub Actions.
- Static code analysis via LGTM and Coverity.
Package dependencies of libbpf, package names may vary across distros:
- zlib
- libelf
bpf-next to Github sync
All the gory details of syncing can be found in scripts/sync-kernel.sh
script. See SYNC.md for instruction.
Some header files in this repo (include/linux/*.h) are reduced versions of
their counterpart files at
bpf-next's
tools/include/linux/*.h to make compilation successful.
License
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