On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 7:23 AM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The samples/bpf directory in the kernel tree started out as a way of showcasing > different aspects of BPF functionality by writing small utility programs for > each feature. However, as the BPF subsystem has matured, the preferred way of > including userspace code with a feature has become the BPF selftests, which also > have the benefit of being consistently run as part of the BPF CI system. > > As a result of this shift, the utilities in samples/bpf have seen little love, > and have slowly bitrotted. There have been sporadic cleanup patches over the > years, but it's clear that the utilities are far from maintained. > > For XDP in particular, some of the utilities have been used as benchmarking aids > when implementing new kernel features, which seems to be the main reason they > have stuck around; any updates the utilities have seen have been targeted at > this use case. However, as the BPF subsystem as a whole has moved on, it has > become increasingly difficult to incorporate new features into these utilities > because they predate most of the modern BPF features (such as kfuncs and BTF). > > Rather than try to update these utilities and keep maintaining them in the > kernel tree, we have ported the useful features of the utilities to the > xdp-tools package. In the porting process we also updated the utilities to take > advantage of modern BPF features, integrated them with libxdp, and polished the > user interface. > > As these utilities are standalone tools, maintaining them out of tree is > simpler, and we plan to keep maintaining them in the xdp-tools repo. To direct > users of these utilities to the right place, this series removes the utilities > from samples/bpf, leaving in place only a couple of utilities whose > functionality have not yet been ported to xdp-tools. > > The xdp-tools repository is located on Github at the following URL: > > https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-tools Could you add this link with details to samples/bpf/README.rst, so that folks know where to look for them? Other than that the set makes sense to me.
