Re: [RFC bpf-next 0/4] bpf: Speed up symbol resolving in kprobe multi link

[Andrii Nakryiko <andrii.nakryiko@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 3:18 PM Alexei Starovoitov
<alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 10:15 PM Andrii Nakryiko
> <andrii.nakryiko@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 9, 2022 at 1:24 PM Jiri Olsa <olsajiri@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Fri, Apr 08, 2022 at 04:29:22PM -0700, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Apr 07, 2022 at 02:52:20PM +0200, Jiri Olsa wrote:
> > > > > hi,
> > > > > sending additional fix for symbol resolving in kprobe multi link
> > > > > requested by Alexei and Andrii [1].
> > > > >
> > > > > This speeds up bpftrace kprobe attachment, when using pure symbols
> > > > > (3344 symbols) to attach:
> > > > >
> > > > > Before:
> > > > >
> > > > >   # perf stat -r 5 -e cycles ./src/bpftrace -e 'kprobe:x* {  } i:ms:1 { exit(); }'
> > > > >   ...
> > > > >   6.5681 +- 0.0225 seconds time elapsed  ( +-  0.34% )
> > > > >
> > > > > After:
> > > > >
> > > > >   # perf stat -r 5 -e cycles ./src/bpftrace -e 'kprobe:x* {  } i:ms:1 { exit(); }'
> > > > >   ...
> > > > >   0.5661 +- 0.0275 seconds time elapsed  ( +-  4.85% )
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > There are 2 reasons I'm sending this as RFC though..
> > > > >
> > > > >   - I added test that meassures attachment speed on all possible functions
> > > > >     from available_filter_functions, which is 48712 functions on my setup.
> > > > >     The attach/detach speed for that is under 2 seconds and the test will
> > > > >     fail if it's bigger than that.. which might fail on different setups
> > > > >     or loaded machine.. I'm not sure what's the best solution yet, separate
> > > > >     bench application perhaps?
> > > >
> > > > are you saying there is a bug in the code that you're still debugging?
> > > > or just worried about time?
> > >
> > > just the time, I can make the test fail (cross the 2 seconds limit)
> > > when the machine is loaded, like with running kernel build
> > >
> > > but I couldn't reproduce this with just paralel test_progs run
> > >
> > > >
> > > > I think it's better for it to be a part of selftest.
> > > > CI will take extra 2 seconds to run.
> > > > That's fine. It's a good stress test.
> >
> > I agree it's a good stress test, but I disagree on adding it as a
> > selftests. The speed will depend on actual host machine. In VMs it
> > will be slower, on busier machines it will be slower, etc. Generally,
> > depending on some specific timing just causes unnecessary maintenance
> > headaches. We can have this as a benchmark, if someone things it's
> > very important. I'm impartial to having this regularly executed as
> > it's extremely unlikely that we'll accidentally regress from NlogN
> > back to N^2. And if there is some X% slowdown such selftest is
> > unlikely to alarm us anyways. Sporadic failures will annoy us way
> > before that to the point of blacklisting this selftests in CI at the
> > very least.
>
> Such selftest shouldn't be measuring the speed, of course.
> The selftest will be about:
> 1. not crashing
> 2. succeeding to attach and getting some meaningful data back.

Yeah, that's totally fine with me. My biggest beef is using time as a
measure of test success, which will be flaky. Just a slow-ish test
doing a lot of work sounds totally fine.