Subject: Re: [PATCHv3 iproute2-next 0/5] iproute2: add libbpf support

From: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2020 23:36:25 +0100

Daniel Borkmann <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Besides, for the entire history of BPF support in iproute2 so far, the
>> benefit has come from all the features that libbpf has just started
>> automatically supporting on load (BTF, etc), so users would have
>> benefited from automatic library updates had it *not* been vendored in.
>
> Not really. What you imply here is that we're living in a perfect
> world and that all distros follow suite and i) add libbpf dependency
> to their official iproute2 package, ii) upgrade iproute2 package along
> with new kernel releases and iii) upgrade libbpf along with it so that
> users are able to develop BPF programs against the feature set that
> the kernel offers (as intended). These are a lot of moving parts to
> get right, and as I pointed out earlier in the conversation, it took
> major distros 2 years to get their act together to officially include
> bpftool as a package - I'm not making this up, and this sort of pace
> is simply not sustainable. It's also not clear whether distros will
> get point iii) correct.

I totally get that you've been frustrated with the distro adoption and
packaging of BPF-related tools. And rightfully so. I just don't think
that the answer to this is to try to work around distros, but rather to
work with them to get things right.

I'm quite happy to take a shot at getting a cross-distro effort going in
this space; really, having well-supported BPF tooling ought to be in
everyone's interest!

-Toke