The 2017 IO Visor summit took place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on February 27th, 2017. It is at least the second summit of its kind, being preceded by the XDP Summit on June 23rd, 2016. I could not attend physically to the meeting, but VMware, organizer of the event, kindly provided remote access through WebEx, and I was able to attend from remote.

Author’s foreword

This article is a summary of what I heard and saw during the Summit. As a disclaimer, the audio quality I experienced was not so good (and to be honest, not being a native English speaker does not help grasping all what is said), and could not hear everything the speakers said. In particular, I would understand nearly nothing of the questions asked by people in the assistance. We had access to projected slides, but no image of the room (just the ones from Twitter).

So of course, do not take my writings as truth, I may have misheard some stuff. In particular, if you also attended, or even talked during the Summit, and have corrections to provide, please do not hesitate to reach out! Other readers might be interested to know that the talks were recorded and should eventually be available on the net.

The agenda of the talk was here.

Many thanks to Deepa Kalani from VMware for providing remote access, and for relaying my questions from the WebEx chat during the Summit.

Intro, greetings

  • Pere Monclus, VP, R&D at VMware
  • Alexei Starovoitov, Software Engineer, Facebook

I missed most of it, because of connection issues. Happily, seeing the title I missed nothing too technical.

From what I got from the talk, it was about the current state of IO Visor project as a whole. From the first “PLUM“ engine launched in January 2011, the project has evolved and now has a 6-year old community. It joined the Linux foundation, developed a number of tools, produced many kernel patches. The community keeps growing and works on use cases such as networking, tracing, but also storage and security (regarding security, I think about Cilium or XDP for DDoS protection, but I do not know what are the use cases for storage).

Most tools developed for the project are of course available at https://github.com/iovisor/.

bcc tools: Strategy, current tools, future challenges

  • Brendan Gregg, Senior Performance Architect at Netflix

You can measure the influence of Netflix when the speaker uses a title slide à la Stranger Things… This talk is about the bcc framework and set of tools. If you read this article, you most probably already heard of it or even played with them.

Brendan presented the current state of the tools. There is already an impressive number of utilities, targeting all layers of the Linux system. He explained that bcc contains both “single-purpose tools”, such as opensnoop (only showing calls to open() syscall), as well as multitools such as trace, that have a more complex command syntax but are able to perform a variety of tasks.

Beyond adding new tools, the project aims at maintaining the current ones into a coherent set:

  • Output of tools is not made on a whim, but follows some well-defined templates, to look more familiar to Linux users (per-vent output, time intervals, histograms…).
  • They try to use POSIX-style arguments.
  • The tools have to be documented.
  • They also have to be tested. Quoting the slide, “If you can’t write the workload, you can’t write the tool”.

Regarding future work, there is not much to do at the moment regarding BPF support, since bcc already supports nearly all BPF features from the kernel. There is still a list of issues on the GitHub repository, though. Other work should include:

  • Some more tools, including some that Brendan has not ported from DTrace yet.
  • Cleaning up, maintaining existing tools (since kernel evolves).
  • Working on USDT.
  • Reducing overhead, in particular with uprobes.
  • Maybe make it easier to develop tools (in this regard, see also ply).
  • Work on visualizations (flame graphs etc.)

There was some question about having bcc on OS X I believe? But I could not hear the answer. Other questions I did not understand. Personally, I asked about plans to add new tutorials or tools related to networking aspects in bcc. It seems that Brendan leaves it to people working on networking stuff (so, not from him I get).

Tracing TCP connections for Weave Scope

  • Alban Crequy, Director & Software Engineer at Kinvolk

Slides available on the net.

Full title was:

Tracing TCP connections for Weave Scope — Visualization and monitoring tool for Docker and Kubernetes as used by Weave Works

Under this descriptive headline hides a brief introduction to Weave Scope, and to the use case it constitutes for eBPF.

Weave Scope is an Open Source solution for container managing and monitoring, available on GitHub. The website says:

Zero configuration or integration required — just launch Weave Scope and go! Automatically detects processes, containers, hosts. No kernel modules, no agents, no special libraries, no coding. Seamless integration with Kubernetes and AWS ECS.

As such, it is deployed on a set of nodes (for example, Kubernetes nodes) and needs to trace some parameters from those nodes. For example, it needs to monitor IP and L4 port, source and destination, between a client and a server, or NAT details, etc.

To do so, Weave Scope has used or explored a number of technologies, each having their limitations:

  • procfs and conntrack,
  • Netlink sockets, and
  • tracepoints and eBPF.

It turns out the best solution so far is yet something else: eBPF attached to kprobes. In a succession of steps, they moved to using bcc (and Python) to Go language and an ELF loader, in particular to lighten the dependencies needed in the Alpine OS image (thus getting rid of llvm, elfutils libraries and kernel headers).

As a consequence they use a single eBPF program for all the kernel version. But this implies having to guess the offset of the attributes in some structs! From what I understood this is done by checking the offset of some expected values in the memory, and by keeping states (uninitialized, checking, checked) in maps.

A number of challenges have not be solved to this date. This include things like perf event ordering or endianness with struct sock (see slides for details). Also, they had some troubles with continuous integration tests since most free services such as Travis CI use old kernel with no eBPF and some restrictions. Their solution: using SemaphoreCI with rkt and a specialised stage1.

The “Tracing TCP connections“ part of the title refers to this example.

ebpf-cgroups in Kubernetes and Prometheus

  • Alban Crequy, Director & Software Engineer at Kinvolk

Slides available on the net.

Alban went on and presented Kinvolk’s work on ebpf-cgroups, a frontend leveraging the eBPF capacity to get attached to cgroups. If I understood correctly, they use it with Prometheus, an Open Source tool using “metrics-based time series database for monitoring”, to indeed monitor Kubernetes nodes.

They seem to be using LRU eBPF hash maps to collect metrics from the nodes.

The talk was short, around 10 minutes, and did not bring many questions as far as I remember.

Tracing the CDN with LuaJIT-BPF / bcc

  • Marek Vavrusa, Programmer (R&D) at Cloudflare

Marek developed a compiler from LuaJIT to eBPF. Though started as a side project, it eventually ended up in bcc repository as one of the existing front- and back-ends. The talk comes back on the motivation of this project, the way it works, and presents the next steps.

Motivation comes from the will to trace events in Cloudflare’s infrastructure, in particular: sockets for DNS services. But they run several services on up to 27k addresses! Hence the idea to create socket groups for each process, and to attach SO_REUSEPORT BPF programs to those groups. Programs can update per-destination maps to provide statistics. The need for a LuaJIT compiler itself comes from the reluctance of people doing the monitoring to develop complex tools.

Hence the creation of the tool. LuaJIT has a number of practical features in this context (and it is easier than C), even though several elements differ from eBPF (LuaJIT has “slots” where eBPF has registers and stack, LuaJIT has no pointer arithmetic, etc.). But it works well for writing both user and kernel space code.

Future steps include further eBPF code optimisation, and some work outside of the compiler (visualization, access control for examples).

A control / management plane for IO Modules

  • Fulvio Risso, Associate Professor at Politecnico di Torino

This is one of the few academic projects using eBPF I heard of. Fulvio Risso and his team use IO Modules for NFV, thus providing a new backend to OVN (the second repository seems to be the one containing the up-to-date IO Modules). To explain this choice, they state that:

  • IO Modules are fast (1.3 64-byte long Mpps, when OvS is a bit higher at 1.4+). In particular, chaining services provide good performances, even without XDP (36 Gbps in TCP throughput for an IO Visor-based VM, against 24 Gbps for OpenStack).
  • IO Modules are flexible, they easily produce the desired chain of services.
  • IO Modules are powerful and can express a lot of services. Or are they?

The speaker argued that eBPF has its own limitation and cannot implement everything, hence the need for a “slow path”. Example: broadcasting a packet to a variety of IO Modules (cannot be done through tail calls). This slow path, implemented in userspace, is opposed to the “fast path” they build with eBPF in the kernel. They are not necessarily on the same device, and they communicate through a management and control layer.

This slow path seems to be implemented in the “Hover” module coming with the IO Modules. There are two parts. All modules use a local Hover controller that registers a callback in the global Hover controller, which can later call it to redirect exception packets it receives. On the dataplane level, each local controller acts as a proxy between the IO Module and the global centralized Hover module. The full slow path detail is:

IO Module → encapsulator → perf ring buffer → local ctrler → global ctrler
    → back to local ctrler → tap → decapsulator → back to IO Module.

The local controller also acts as a “user space helper”, in the sense it provides some features that can be used from the IO Modules without having to reach each time for the global controller. People are encouraged to tell what “helpers” of this kind they need.

An example use case for this work is a L2 switch, whose code has been considerably reduced after the implementation of the slow path. The team also worked on a router prototype, and have a DHCP implemented in the slow path (but intend to make a smarter version in the datapath).

All the code and examples, for IO Modules and for the control plane, can be run with and without OVN, from the code in this repository. Work to come include improving the controller, maybe move to a generic SDN controller (ONOS?), or stabilizing the specifications and API of the control path. Also they would like to gather a community around the project, even if they are not so many companies working with eBPF for networking, on the dataplane, right now.

Answering a question I could not understand, Fulvio explained that he expect few packets to be raised as exceptions and sent through the control path. Fewer, in fact, than for current SDN solutions, since eBPF, even if it can not be used in all cases, remains pretty powerful.

Personally, I had not heard much about a “slow path” for eBPF before that. Of course, when deploying eBPF in a vast network, there would be some need for a kind of controller that would, for example, generate the eBPF programs and send them to the switching nodes. This is, I believe, what happens with Cilium, or what I would like to have for BEBA project. But here it is about dealing with exception packets, not only configuration.

Also, it is interesting to see that the slow path is in userspace, while the concept of XDP would rather be to remain on the kernel for all tasks: use eBPF for fast dataplane, and default to the network stack otherwise. I do not know how complementary this would be with the material described in this talk, sadly I did not have time to formulate and ask a question at the end of the presentation.

OvS eBPF datapath

  • Joe Stringer, Software Engineer at VMware

The Open vSwitch (OvS) team has been looking at eBPF for a while, and several patches have already been written to clean the path in that direction.

The objective is to get better performances, more flexibility and more stability. The principle leading the transition is: implement datapath in eBPF, see what it’s like, fallback on userspace when necessary. Then extend it incrementally.

The current OvS design would be adapted to eBPF components, with hash map instead of flow table, perf ring instead of “upcall” etc. The parser could be generated with P4. One eBPF program could be used per action, then they can be chained with tail calls (somewhat similar to what Cilium and IO Modules do, in fact).

There are open questions on megaflows, connections tracking (involving IP defragmentation), and packet cloning:

  • Current version of OvS uses both exact match and megaflow, adapting this to eBPF would require a way to use masks for lookup.
  • Connexion tracking could use either a specific eBPF helper, or some specific eBPF bytecode (consumes instructions, but easier to port and to use with XDP).
  • I don’t remember the issues about packet cloning. Maybe the same thing as with IO Modules: eBPF tail calls (or eBPF in general) does not allow to clone packets?

There were a lot of discussions here, in particular about the “tuple space search table” (to replace flow table; not yet in the kernel as far as I know), but I could not grasp much of the discussion.

Someone asked about the upcoming work on the topic. From what I heard (and from what Joe later told me by email, thanks!), there is a number of patches that already exist to implement some basic features of this eBPF datapath, not pushed yet. People work on their private trees for now and, quoting Joe, “Probably when [they] get something that implements a pretty reasonable amount of the OvS functionality [they] will start pushing out to the lists for further comments and review”. And of course, there are those open issues to fix one way or another.

This is really interesting to see some production-oriented software such as OvS, which is the reference for virtual switching in the industry, slowly turn to eBPF to implement its dataplane—the very core of packet processing. Of course the process cannot be instantaneous, but it will be nice to see what an eBPF-based OvS is able to do. I am also curious to see how they generate programs from OpenFlow commands.

Cilium — Status of recent work and current limitations

  • Thomas Graf, CTO & Co-Founder at Covalent IO

Thomas is doing a lot of dissemination work about Cilium, this is maybe the fifth talk he gives on the subject. So for this one, he announced he would focus on the new work achieved over the last year. In the end I was a bit disappointed, since most of the talk remained pretty similar to the previous presentations about Cilium.

So if you do not know about Cilium, this is some Open Source solution to manage networks of IPv6 (mostly) containers, regarding network fabric as well as security. To this end, Cilium generates one eBPF program for each container / task / service / endpoint, that is attached to tc (or XDP?) interface. The security is enforced via rules based on identities, themselves based on metadata on endpoints and carried through the network thanks to labels contained in the packets. The Cilium architecture naturally adapts to any container framework (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.). And it scales pretty well with the number of cores (two linear factors: one from 1 to 8 cores, and a slower one from progression after 8 cores).

Happily, there was some new elements since the presentation of last submit. The load balancer use case, for example, did not exist at that time. Now, Cilium also has IPv4 support, or L4 policy support. Further improvements are expected: more integration with Kubernetes, in particular an “ingress implementation” (though I do not know what it refers to), transparent redirection into proxies, or collection of metrics and statistics to send them to some monitoring solution such as Prometheus.

There were not many questions. Well, it was lunch break time…

XDP for virtual machines

  • John Fastabend, Software Engineer, Intel

Slides available on the net.

The two successive talks on XDP by John Fastabend are my greatest source of regrets on the Summit: it looked very promising, and most probably it was: John is involved in all discussion about XDP design and optimizations on the kernel networking mailing list, and is currently working on porting XDP to Intel’s ixgbe and i40e drivers. But the talk turned out to be more like a workshop or Q&A session, and I just could not understand most of the talks and discussions. Plus the “here” and “there” in the speech suggest that John was pointing at the diagrams on the slides, and I could not see such gestures either. I’ll definitely have to watch it if the videos are released.

From the slides, we see that the objective of the work is to use XDP to implement a virtual switch and to attach it to a virtual host; then to add also a virtual switch with XDP on the hypervisor itself, just above the physical NIC. By using the XDP_REDIRECT action, it is able to steer packets directly to the XDP switch attached to the virtual host. This action is still to add into the kernel at this date.

In the end, the idea is to have traffic between virtual machines, or between VMs and hypervisor, driven by XDP components for high performances. TSO (for TX) and LSO (for RX) support is also expected.

John has no benchmark results ready to show yet, but he should have some in a near future.

XDP hardware metadata integration

  • John Fastabend, Software Engineer, Intel

Slides available on the net. The slides are at the end of the previous set.

Similarly to the previous talk, this one was mostly a discussion session that I did not manage to follow.

The couple of slides show that some network features, namely checksum, TSO or other inline programming metadata that hardware is able to compute today need some specific space along with the packet data buffer to be forwarded to software. WIth XDP, this “headroom space” is limited (192 bytes for now), hence the open question: what should be done to be able to preserve those features?

Again, I’ll have to watch the video to catch up with the discussion… Sorry for the poor coverage!

Design and implementation of P4/XDP

  • William Tu, Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware
  • Mihai Budiu, Senior Staff Researcher at VMware

The first slides are a brief presentation to P4 language. It is used in order to describe the architecture of a switch or, since the P416 version, of any network function, and then to be compiled towards a specific target. This P416 version now supports a large number of devices.

In particular, there is a compiler from P4 to eBPF for XDP that William has developed. The XDP switching model is described: parser, then {match + action}, with maps potentially used to communicate with control plane, then deparser. This can be described with P4, then the p4c-xdp tool produces both a .c file (holding the eBPF program, to be compiled from C) and a .h header file (describing the maps for user space programs). The program is compiled into an object file and injected into the kernel, where it passes the verifier and eventually gets attached to the XDP hook. The slides provide code samples for the parser, table match/action, and deparser blocks in P4, that I will not reproduce here. The deparser is used to update the packet, for example by pushing new headers.

Dependencies to run the program include the P416 prototype compiler, and recent versions of stuff that is easy to get on Linux (kernel, iproute2, clang/LLVM).

The project had some issues with the eBPF in-kernel verifier, but fixed it on the kernel side. It still have some open issues, such as the state of registers not being tracked when the data is spilled to the stack, or another one that is not related to the verifier, but instead to the limited size of the stack (512 bytes as of this writing).

Then comes the presentation of three demos (not shown during the talk, only resumed on slides). The videos of the demos are available on William’s YouTube page (the last three at this date; search for P4 or XDP). They were about: swap Ethernet, ping4/6 and stats, and encapsulation. The code, as you can guess, is on GitHub.

The presentation ends with a slide on “Future Wok”: next steps include work on forwarding to any port with XDP (not yet supported in kernel), broadcasting or cloning packets (same problem as everyone else), recirculation, and providing more use cases. This seems good (sorry, couldn’t help!).

There was a question I wanted to ask: is it possible to have it the other way round, to compile eBPF to P4 in order to program ASICs? I asked on the chat, but the question was noticed too late to be answered: the next talk had already begun. Too bad, maybe next time!

XDP use cases: DDoS, load balancer, IPVS and ILA router

  • Alexei Starovoitov, Software Engineer, Facebook
  • Satendra Gera, Software Engineer at Versa Networks Inc.
  • Nikita Shirokov, Production Engineer at Facebook
  • Huapeng Zhou, Software Engineer at Facebook

This was a four-in-one presentation about several use cases for XDP at Facebook and Versa Networks:

  • Protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, by Huapeng Zhou.
  • L4 load balancing, by Nikita Shirokov.
  • XDP vs. IPVS, and
  • ILA router, by Satendra Gera and Alexei Starovoitov, though I am unsure who presented what.

Droplet: DDoS protection using BPF

The first use cases presented is protection against DDoS. Something I was impatient to hear about: I have some previous experience with DDoS, but most of all, this is sold as one of the main use case for XDP, and discussions about the design are regularly referring to this use case.

So the talk is about Droplet, which is a DDoS protection framework from Facebook. It uses the classical bcc workflow, and attaches programs to tc or XDP interface. The Droplet “handler” deals with runtime compilation and loads the program into the kernel. Well, I thought that was just what bcc was about already? Is Droplet another wrapper layer around bcc Python script?

Probably it brings some helpers more related to DDoS protection. The talk mentioned “generic handler”, “IP handler”, “prefix handler”. The user still has to write some eBPF program (in C language), it is not automatically generated.

It is possible to “chain” the rules, the countermeasures, well in fact to chain eBPF programs. With tc, this is easy, since the interface is able to drive the packet through several successive programs. No such thing with XDP, but chaining remains possible with tail calls—as all other people chaining programs on talks about XDP seem to do anyway. They “control filter runtime behavior via CFLAGS”, though I am not sure what this means, and it does not seem an ideal solution. So the work is not finished yet.

There was no benchmark, and the bad news: I asked if it is Open Source, but at this time it is not, there is an confidentiality issue on some part. There seems to be plans to open it at some point, though, so let’s cross fingers. I would like to experiment with this!

XDP for L4 load balancing

The second use case was about L4 load balancing. It was short, and I do not remember it well. The idea is to use XDP to implement a L4 load balancer. Then the L4 load balancer seems to encapsulate the packet and to push it to a L7 load balancing device, where the packet is decapsulated, and probably forwarded to the relevant service. I am not sure XDP intervenes on the L7 level. You’d probably better wait for the videos if you’re really interested in this one…

XDP vs. IPVS

We stay on load balancing with this one. IPVS is a L4 load balancing feature available from the Linux Kernel, and based on Netfilter. Here it is described as “too generic”, hard to extend. The speaker also explains that XDP brings much better performances: the tests performed show that it can do between 3 and 6 times better with high (99%) cache hit, and 10 times, or even up to 25 times (without session tracking) when the cache hit is at 0%. Impressive figures!

ILA router

ILA is for Identifier Locator Addressing. It consists in splitting an IPv6 address into two parts, locator (“where”) and identifier (“who”). Routing to end points use locators, then identifier are used as endpoint addresses of virtual nodes. You can find some documentation about it on the web, often by Tom Herbert, who also works at Facebook (at the time of this Summit) and contributes to XDP (he organized the previous summit, by the way).

Here the talk is about implementing an ILA router with XDP. Since the routing operations seem relatively simple, with no encapsulation, the use case looks well-suited for XDP. There is no particular technical detail that drew specific attention, as far as I remember: the router uses XDP with hash maps for the tables. On the diagram, with ILA hosts on the sides, the router seems to be placed “above” a switch placed in the middle? This could allow to send the packet from switch to router, then back to the switch on the same port, since XDP is currently limited and cannot forward a packet on another port that the one it comes from.

ILA routing itself faces some issues, just search the web if you want more details. There was a question about checksums I believe, but I failed to understand the discussion. The question of open sourcing the project was raised again: while the control plane of the ILA router seems to be generic, the address resolution stuff would not be ready for a release at this time, so again this may happen in the future, not immediately. There was also some talks about resistance of the router to DDoS, and in that XDP seems to do a pretty good job, so ultimately the limit is the speed at which the driver can drive packets.

Additional use cases

People from Facebook also stated that they had some other use cases involving XDP, and named two of them. One had to do with storage, and the other one I could not hear about.

Transparent XDP / BPF offload to hardware

  • Nick Viljoen, Research and Development at Netronome

The presentation of Netronome does not present a specific use case for XDP or eBPF. Instead, it explains how the company managed to offload eBPF execution… to their hardware platform. That’s super interesting, and really promising!

Their NFP board is made of “islands” containing 12 “Flow Processing Cores” (FPC) each, for a total ranging from 72 to 120 FPCs. Some of those cores are used to process packets as a standard NIC would do, others (half of them it seems) are used to process JIT-compiled eBPF instructions. A special island is responsible for communicating with the kernel module.

This kernel driver, in particular, can be used to perform the offload. It registers a NDO (“Network Device Operation”, if I remember correctly?), as would any other driver, except this one is used to extract the eBPF code from tc of XDP hook (they are working on XDP offload).

Regarding the offload, Nick insisted on the fact they did not want to focus on what to offload, but instead on how to offload eBPF stuff, to avoid whack-a-mole problems. As I take it, this means you are pretty free to offload any eBPF stuff you want, since Netronome has designed a nice workflow to do that.

So back to the offload itself: there is this NDO. The module can get an eBPF program from there. When the program is provided to the driver, it has already been injected into the kernel, and it has passed the verifier (a first time). The driver will call a specific function to perform a second pass, slightly different, of the verifier on the program, possibly registering some custom verifications (in order to reject programs using features unsupported by the board, for example).

Then the program is JIT-compiled, and sent to the board via PCIe, where it can be executed as it would be in the kernel. But on dedicated hardware. XDP is fast, XDP on hardware sounds… pretty awesome. They get about 3 Mpps per FPC for write + redirect operations, and just a bit less for read + write operations.

All of this was already in at least one earlier presentation by Netronome. What was new however was their detailed plans regarding maps. They intend to share read-only maps with the kernel, but to have a single copy on hardware for read/write maps. In both cases, some new mechanisms must be added to the kernel to intercept update and lookup operations, or to lock the maps in the kernel. The access type could be determined by the verifier.

They also explained some optimizations that the JIT-compiler is able to bring to the eBPF code, such as sometimes merging several instructions (e.g. shift right, logical “and” and move) into a single one (in this case “alu_shf”, I don’t know what it stands for exactly).

There is still some work to do, it seems, before map offload reaches the kernel. But I’m really curious to see what offloaded eBPF with maps could be like. Dedicated hardware for hashmaps, anyone?

Gobpf — Utilizing BPF from Go

  • Alban Crequy, Director & Software Engineer at Kinvolk

Alban comes back in a third talk, this time to present the Go implementation of tools for handling eBPF. Using Go was motivated by personal preferences and by their working environment (Weave Scope is in Go).

With Gobpf, it is possible to reuse the helpers from the bcc tools, or to load eBPF programs directly from ELF object files. Some examples were provided for each case, and they can be found on the GitHub repository. For eBPF-based programs, the continuous integration remains an issue for now (old drivers, non-root access etc.). Kinvolk’s solution remains the same as explained earlier: SemaphoreCI with a custom stage1 for rkt.

I don’t remember of any question on this talk, but maybe I forgot them.

Libiov — A Framework for building IO Modules

  • Brenden Blanco, Staff Engineer at VMware

Slides available on the net.

And finally the last presentation was about libiov, a library, or even an interface, to “connect IO Modules”. It is based on the following observation: the current eBPF tools are quite disparate in their way to be called and used. The attach points are specific to each type of program (kprobes uses tracefs, tc uses a classifier, XDP uses the driver, etc.), the debugging facilities are not the same, maps handling is somewhat opaque, and map themselves can be tied to a process as well as pinned on the file system…

All of this makes it difficult to somehow find a way to unify eBPF program and maps handling. While this does not seem to be a major limitation when using a single tracing tool or networking feature, this may become a handicap when trying to couple more complex IO Modules, or to use for example programs on cgroup and tc and kprobes at the same time… This is what libiov tries to solve.

This is based on a model with “events”, “actions” and “buses”. It seems to be described with more details on the GitHub repository. The buses seem to be used as an intermediary between events and actions: it is possible to subscribe to events (that are sent on the buses), and to describe actions to perform on those buses (such as filter() or notify()).

Ultimately, this library is expected to help modularize the eBPF objects so that they can support different backends: C language, P4, ply, LuaJIT etc. An objective for future work would be to also provide support for several eBPF implementations: kernel of course, but also hardware offload, and userspace virtual machines for eBPF like uBPF or… rbpf! My eBPF implementation in Rust was mentioned, I was proud of it. Made it totally worth to follow the Summit until the end, even if that was at 2 a.m. in Paris…

Libiov could also be used to implement a number of utilities, not in the sense of bcc tracing tools, but rather utilities to work with eBPF and improve the workflow: map dumping tools (similar to bpf-map from Cilium), lsof for eBPF programs, etc. This looks really interesting, those tools would be of great assistance to develop more eBPF-based projects.

The motivation behind the library is excellent, and the technical concept is intriguing. I will have to look deeper into the examples and code, it would be really nice to have rbpf compatible with bcc for instance.

Conclusion

The high-quality talks in this summit offered an interesting state-of-the-art overview of the work on XDP and eBPF in general. The community is going well, growing and multiplying projects based on this technology.

In regard to last year’s summit, some companies did not intervene (or I did not spot them), I’m thinking in particular at Huawei or at Mellanox (I don’t know what the current state of CETH is).

Even though the PLUMgrid company, who initiated the IO Visor project, was recently acquired, the fact that VMware (the buyer) organized the summit shows that the people remain engaged in the project.

On the technical side, eBPF is spreading to a number of layers: OvS datapath, kernel and process tracing, cgroup filtering… This comes with a number of use cases: programmable switching and routing, DDoS protection, managing containers. We can expect that eBPF-based project will keep spreading, and that new use cases are yet to appear. I am really eager to see what comes out from XDP, and what impact it will have on high-performance networking.