Subject: Re: [PATCH] tracing/user_events: Add eBPF interface for user_event created events

From: Beau Belgrave <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2022 13:10:57 -0700

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 12:50:40PM -0700, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 11:19 AM Beau Belgrave
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >
> > Send user_event data to attached eBPF programs for user_event based perf
> > events.
> >
> > Add BPF_ITER flag to allow user_event data to have a zero copy path into
> > eBPF programs if required.
> >
> > Update documentation to describe new flags and structures for eBPF
> > integration.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Beau Belgrave <[email-masked]>
> 
> The commit describes _what_ it does, but says nothing about _why_.
> At present I see no use out of bpf and user_events connection.
> The whole user_events feature looks redundant to me.
> We have uprobes and usdt. It doesn't look to me that
> user_events provide anything new that wasn't available earlier.

A lot of the why, in general, for user_events is covered in the first
change in the series.
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email-masked]/

The why was also covered in Linux Plumbers Conference 2021 within the
tracing microconference.

An example of why we want user_events:
Managed code running that emits data out via Open Telemetry.
Since it's managed there isn't a stub location to patch, it moves.
We watch the Open Telemetry spans in an eBPF program, when a span takes
too long we collect stack data and perform other actions.
With user_events and perf we can monitor the entire system from the root
container without having to have relay agents within each
cgroup/namespace taking up resources.
We do not need to enter each cgroup mnt space and determine the correct
patch location or the right version of each binary for processes that
use user_events.

An example of why we want eBPF integration:
We also have scenarios where we are live decoding the data quickly.
Having user_data fed directly to eBPF lets us cast the data coming in to
a struct and decode very very quickly to determine if something is
wrong.
We can take that data quickly and put it into maps to perform further
aggregation as required.
We have scenarios that have "skid" problems, where we need to grab
further data exactly when the process that had the problem was running.
eBPF lets us do all of this that we cannot easily do otherwise.

Another benefit from user_events is the tracing is much faster than
uprobes or others using int 3 traps. This is critical to us to enable on
production systems.

Thanks,
-Beau