RE: [PATCH bpf-next 3/3] selftest/bpf: add BPF triggring benchmark

[John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>]

Andrii Nakryiko wrote:
> It is sometimes desirable to be able to trigger BPF program from user-space
> with minimal overhead. sys_enter would seem to be a good candidate, yet in
> a lot of cases there will be a lot of noise from syscalls triggered by other
> processes on the system. So while searching for low-overhead alternative, I've
> stumbled upon getpgid() syscall, which seems to be specific enough to not
> suffer from accidental syscall by other apps.
> 
> This set of benchmarks compares tp, raw_tp w/ filtering by syscall ID, kprobe,
> fentry and fmod_ret with returning error (so that syscall would not be
> executed), to determine the lowest-overhead way. Here are results on my
> machine:
> 
> $ for i in base tp rawtp kprobe fentry fmodret; \
> do \
>     summary=$(sudo ./bench -w2 -d5 -a trig-$i | \
>               tail -n1 | cut -d'(' -f1 | cut -d' ' -f3- ) && \
>     printf "%-10s: %s\n" $i "$summary"; \
> done
> 
> base      :    9.200 ± 0.319M/s
> tp        :    6.690 ± 0.125M/s
> rawtp     :    8.571 ± 0.214M/s
> kprobe    :    6.431 ± 0.048M/s
> fentry    :    8.955 ± 0.241M/s
> fmodret   :    8.903 ± 0.135M/s
> 
> So it seems like fmodret doesn't give much benefit for such lightweight
> syscall. Raw tracepoint is pretty decent despite additional filtering logic,
> but it will be called for any other syscall in the system, which rules it out.
> Fentry, though, seems to be adding the least amoung of overhead and achieves
> 97.3% of performance of baseline no-BPF-attached syscall.
> 
> Using getpgid() seems to be preferable to set_task_comm() approach from
> test_overhead, as it's about 2.35x faster in a baseline performance.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andriin@fb.com>
> ---

Nice.

Acked-by: John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>