Improving bpftrace reliability (asg2024)

bpftrace is a popular and powerful dynamic tracer for Linux systems. In the vast majority of uses cases, bpftrace does its job quickly, efficiently, and accurately. However with the rapid increase of users, use cases, and features, the bpftrace community has started to feel (technical) growing pains. In particular, we've started to uncover various reliability issues. In this talk, we will cover what is already done as well as what is currently broken and how we will systematically fix and prevent these issues from re-occuring. Because bpftrace sits at the intersection of operating systems, compilers, and observability, we have the fortunate advantage of being able to absorb techniques and tricks from these fairly different disciplines. We hope that some of the knowledge we share will be both interesting as well practical to attendees. Audience participation is highly welcome. In particular, we are quite interested in receiving feedback in the form of bug reports, feature requests, complaints, etc. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/ about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2024/talk/MXAEYZ/