This adds support for running XDP programs through BPF_PROG_RUN in a mode that enables live packet processing of the resulting frames. Previous uses of BPF_PROG_RUN for XDP returned the XDP program return code and the modified packet data to userspace, which is useful for unit testing of XDP programs. The existing BPF_PROG_RUN for XDP allows userspace to set the ingress ifindex and RXQ number as part of the context object being passed to the kernel. This patch reuses that code, but adds a new mode with different semantics, which can be selected with the new BPF_F_TEST_XDP_LIVE_FRAMES flag. When running BPF_PROG_RUN in this mode, the XDP program return codes will be honoured: returning XDP_PASS will result in the frame being injected into the networking stack as if it came from the selected networking interface, while returning XDP_TX and XDP_REDIRECT will result in the frame being transmitted out that interface. XDP_TX is translated into an XDP_REDIRECT operation to the same interface, since the real XDP_TX action is only possible from within the network drivers themselves, not from the process context where BPF_PROG_RUN is executed. Internally, this new mode of operation creates a page pool instance while setting up the test run, and feeds pages from that into the XDP program. The setup cost of this is amortised over the number of repetitions specified by userspace. To support the performance testing use case, we further optimise the setup step so that all pages in the pool are pre-initialised with the packet data, and pre-computed context and xdp_frame objects stored at the start of each page. This makes it possible to entirely avoid touching the page content on each XDP program invocation, and enables sending up to 9 Mpps/core on my test box. Because the data pages are recycled by the page pool, and the test runner doesn't re-initialise them for each run, subsequent invocations of the XDP program will see the packet data in the state it was after the last time it ran on that particular page. This means that an XDP program that modifies the packet before redirecting it has to be careful about which assumptions it makes about the packet content, but that is only an issue for the most naively written programs. Enabling the new flag is only allowed when not setting ctx_out and data_out in the test specification, since using it means frames will be redirected somewhere else, so they can't be returned. Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org> Acked-by: Martin KaFai Lau <kafai@fb.com> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20220309105346.100053-2-toke@redhat.com
This is a mirror of bpf-next Linux source
tree's
tools/lib/bpf directory plus its supporting header files.
All the gory details of syncing can be found in scripts/sync-kernel.sh
script.
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.
BPF/libbpf usage and questions
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.
Build

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 TravisCI.
- Static code analysis via LGTM and Coverity.
Package dependencies of libbpf, package names may vary across distros:
- zlib
- libelf
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