On 12/13, Quentin Monnet wrote:
> 2018-12-13 12:52 UTC+0100 ~ Daniel Borkmann <dan...@iogearbox.net>
> > On 12/13/2018 07:06 AM, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> >> On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 02:32:01PM -0800, Stanislav Fomichev wrote:
> >>>
> >>> To summarize, I like your idea about doing runtime tests and I think I
> >>> can make it work quite nicely without any config_disabled ugliness by
> >>> looking at the prog_type of each test.
> >>> I can send an RFC patch series out if there still a small chance you could
> >>> take it, but if you've already set you mind, I'd just keep them
> >>> internally. So let me know if you have a hard NACK on the runtime probing
> >>> approach or there is still some wiggle room.
> >>
> >> If there is no uapi/bpf.h change, it's likely fine.
> >> Like if test_verifier tries to load 'foo() {return 0;}' prog
> >> for the .prog_type in the test that failed to confirm that
> >> such prog type is supported by the kernel...
> >> that is fine, since no extra prog_loads are happening for the default case.
> >
> > I think this would kind of go along the lines of what Quentin is working on.
> > Idea [0] is to consolidate effort into bpftool so that one can do something
> > like `bpftool kernel probe` and it generates a header file with CONFIG_*
> > defines for features where bpftool was able to successfully probe the
> > underlying kernel with. This would allow developers to include this header
> > generation as part of the build workflow and avoid having to implement
> > similar probing mechanism in various projects over and over again which aim
> > to run on different kernel versions. I'm wondering whether it would make
> > sense
> > to split the probing part and put it into libbpf where then bpftool is only
> > responsible to call the API and write out the defines? That way, the runtime
> > probing could potentially be reused for selftests as well?
+1
Keeping those low-level probing details in the libbpf seems like a
good idea. `bpftool feature` can then be just a simple a frontend to those
probes to dump them in C/JSON. Tests and other tools can use the
probes on the target host via libbpf to degrade some functionality or
print nice error messages instead of 'EINVAL: Invalid argument'.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Daniel
> >
> > [0] slide 8,12:
> > http://vger.kernel.org/lpc_bpf2018_talks/qmo-bpf-slides-v2.pdf
>
> Hi Daniel, Stanislav,
>
> Thanks for the Cc. I got somewhat delayed in my series, but I just
> finished it and was about to post the patches to the mailing list. Since
> the code is ready to go I'll send it in its current shape, i.e. all
> probes implemented on bpftool side, and we can hopefully use it as a
> support for further discussion.
Just out of curiosity: what's the usecase of generating C defines via
bpftool? Is it for the BCC case where we have the complier on the target
host and can run bpftool+bcc there?
>
> Quentin
