On Wed, 2023-12-13 at 19:04 -0800, Yonghong Song wrote:
> Slightly different from what Alexei proposed, but another approach
> for consideration and discussion.
It looks like Alexei / Yonghong focus on individual addresses,
while as far as I understand Anton's original proposal is more about
program wide switches. E.g. there is some "DEBUG" flag and from
application point of view it does not matter how many static branches
are enabled or disabled by this flag.
In a sense, there is one-to-one vs one-to-many control granularity.
Here is an additional variation for one-to-many approach, basically a
hybrid of Anton's original idea and Andrii's suggestion to use
relocations.
Suppose there is a special type of maps :)
(it does not really matter if it is a map or not, what matters is that
this object has an FD and libbpf knows how to relocate it when
preparing program for load):
struct {
__uint(type, BPF_MAP_TYPE_ARRAY);
__type(key, __u32);
__type(value, __u32);
__uint(map_flags, BPF_F_STATIC_KEY);
__uint(max_entries, 1);
} skey1 SEC(".maps")
And a new instruction, that accepts an fd/pointer corresponding to
this map as a parameter + a label to which to jump if static key is
enabled. E.g., as below:
__attribute__((naked))
int foo(void) {
asm volatile (
"if static %[skey1] goto 1f;" // hypthetical syntax
"r1 = r10;"
"r1 += -8;"
"r2 = 1;"
"call %[bpf_trace_printk];"
"1:"
"exit;"
:: __imm_addr(skey1),
__imm(bpf_trace_printk)
: __clobber_all
);
}
This "if static" is relocated by libbpf in order to get the correct
map fd, when program is loaded.
In effect, each static key is a single entry map with one to many
relationship to instructions / programs it controls.
It can be enabled or disabled using either map update functions
or new system call commands.
What I think is a plus with such approach:
- The application is free to decide how it wants to organize these FDs:
- use one fd per condition;
- have an fd per program;
- have an fd per set of programs.
- Embedding fd with instruction removes need to communicate mapping
information back and forth, or track special section kinds.
