Chapter 15
BPF
This chapter describes the BCC and bpftrace tracing front ends for extended BPF. These front ends provide a collection of performance analysis tools, and these tools were used in previous chapters. The BPF technology was introduced in Chapter 3, Operating System, Section 3.4.4, Extended BPF. In summary, extended BPF is a kernel execution environment that can provide programmatic capabilities to tracers.
This chapter, along with Chapter 13, perf, and Chapter 14, Ftrace, are optional reading for those who wish to learn one or more system tracers in more detail.
Extended BPF tools can be used to answer questions such as:
What is the latency of disk I/O, as a histogram?
Is CPU scheduler latency high enough to cause problems?
Are ...
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