Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 0/4] Add support to directly attach BPF program to ftrace

From: Joel Fernandes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2019 18:41:50 -0400

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 03:26:52PM -0700, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 05:30:50PM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > 
> > I also thought about the pinning idea before, but we also want to add support
> > for not just raw tracepoints, but also regular tracepoints (events if you
> > will). I am hesitant to add a new BPF API just for creating regular
> > tracepoints and then pinning those as well.
> 
> and they should be done through the pinning as well.

Hmm ok, I will give it some more thought.

> > I don't see why a new bpf node for a trace event is a bad idea, really.
> 
> See the patches for kprobe/uprobe FD-based api and the reasons behind it.
> tldr: text is racy, doesn't scale, poor security, etc.

Is it possible to use perf without CAP_SYS_ADMIN and control security at the
per-event level? We are selective about who can access which event, using
selinux. That's how our ftrace-based tracers work. Its fine grained per-event
control. That's where I was going with the tracefs approach since we get that
granularity using the file system.

Thanks.