Challenges of Deploying eBPF-based Tracing in Embedded Systems, and Alternatives in Embe... Bean Huo
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2022-10-08

Challenges of Deploying eBPF-based Tracing in Embedded Systems, and Alternatives in Embedded Platforms Libtracefs/libtraceevent - Bean Huo, Micron

eBPF is a very powerful tracking infrastructure that is widely used in network systems and the cloud. At Micron EBU (Embedded Business Unit), we first started with eBPF for Linux system traces and then found it difficult to deploy in all embedded worlds, especially when we faced customers with older Linux kernels and wanted to Use eBPF for issue tracking/resolving, eBPF cannot be used. This is not just a compilation issue, but also because of the eBPF dependencies in the current existing system. After a long period of exploration and comparison, we decided to use a libtracefs/libtraceevent-based approach, which will give us more confidence to deploy our tracing tools in customer systems. In this talk, I will present a comparison between the two approaches: eBPF and libtracefs/libtraceevnt, including dependencies and kernel requirements. Then I'll show a libtracefs/libtraceevent-based example of how to use libtracefs/libtraceevent as a second alternative tracing method for the embedded world.