Xcapture-BPF
Dev tools
performance profiling
SHOW HN2024
How HN took it
3 positive, 1 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 0 critical, out of 5 comments about the project. Thread score +0.31.
Idea: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
BCC tools helped debug real production issues.
From 2 comments
I use BCC tools weekly to debug production issues. Recently I found we were massively pressuring page caches due to having a large number of loopback devices with their own page…
__turbobrew__ on HNContainers are offered block storage by creating a loopback device with a backing file on the kubelet’s file system. We noticed that on some very heavily utilized nodes that…
__turbobrew__ on HN
eBPF is a powerful debugging superpower.
From 1 comment
I use BCC tools weekly to debug production issues. Recently I found we were massively pressuring page caches due to having a large number of loopback devices with their own page…
__turbobrew__ on HN
Objections
BCC is clunky and has kernel header compatibility issues on some distros.
From 2 comments
I was going to ask "why BCC" (BCC is super clunky) but you're way ahead of us. This is great work, thanks for posting it.
tptacek on HNYeah, I already see limitations, the last one was yesterday when I installed earlier Ubuntu versions to see how far back this can go - and even Ubuntu 22.04 didn't work out of…
tanelpoder on HN
Per-event overhead of tracing sched_switch can be high for busy workloads.
From 1 comment
The on-cpu sample profiling is not a big deal for my use cases as I don't need the "perf" sampling to happen at 10kHz or anything (more like 10-1Hz, but always on). But the…
tanelpoder on HN
Requests
Help wanted for the libbpf-based v3 rewrite.
From 1 comment
Yep (the 0x.tools author here). If you look into my code, you'll see that I'm not a good developer :-) But I have a decent understanding of Linux kernel flow and kernel/app…
tanelpoder on HN
Questions
Relative cost of capturing call stacks during sampling.
From 1 comment
Relatively how expensive is to capture the callstack when doing sample profiling? With Intel CET's tech there should be way to capture a shadow stack, that really just contains…
malkia on HN
Good resources for learning eBPF.
From 1 comment
I’ve never used eBPF, does anyone have some good resources for learning it?
jamesy0ung on HN
Alternatives named
otel-profiling-agent (Elastic)
From 1 comment
Folks who find this useful might also be interested in otel-profiling-agent [1] which Elastic recently opensourced and donated to OpenTelemetry. It's a low-overhead eBPF-based…
metroholografix on HN
Grafana Beyla
From 1 comment
Grafana has one too called Beyla. https://grafana.com/oss/beyla-ebpf/
kbouck on HN
DTrace
From 1 comment
>As for eBPF with respect to DTrace, I would say that they are different systems with different goals and approaches For sure. Different systems, different times. >rather than…
anonfordays on HN