With fentry/fexit programs, it is possible to profile BPF program with
hardware counters. Introduce bpftool "prog profile", which measures key
metrics of a BPF program.
bpftool prog profile command creates per-cpu perf events. Then it attaches
fentry/fexit programs to the target BPF program. The fentry program saves
perf event value to a map. The fexit program reads the perf event again,
and calculates the difference, which is the instructions/cycles used by
the target program.
Example input and output:
./bpftool prog profile id 337 duration 3 cycles instructions llc_misses
4228 run_cnt
3403698 cycles (84.08%)
3525294 instructions # 1.04 insn per cycle (84.05%)
13 llc_misses # 3.69 LLC misses per million isns (83.50%)
This command measures cycles and instructions for BPF program with id
337 for 3 seconds. The program has triggered 4228 times. The rest of the
output is similar to perf-stat. In this example, the counters were only
counting ~84% of the time because of time multiplexing of perf counters.
Note that, this approach measures cycles and instructions in very small
increments. So the fentry/fexit programs introduce noticeable errors to
the measurement results.
The fentry/fexit programs are generated with BPF skeletons. Therefore, we
build bpftool twice. The first time _bpftool is built without skeletons.
Then, _bpftool is used to generate the skeletons. The second time, bpftool
is built with skeletons.
Signed-off-by: Song Liu <songliubraving@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
Reviewed-by: Quentin Monnet <quentin@isovalent.com>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200309173218.2739965-2-songliubraving@fb.com