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 (using benchs/run_bench_trigger.sh script):
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>
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Acked-by: John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200512192445.2351848-5-andriin@fb.com
