eBPF helper functions can be called from within eBPF programs to perform
a variety of tasks that would be otherwise hard or impossible to do with
eBPF itself. There is a growing number of such helper functions in the
kernel, but documentation is scarce. The main user space header file
does contain a short commented description of most helpers, but it is
somewhat outdated and not complete. It is more a "cheat sheet" than a
real documentation accessible to new eBPF developers.
This commit attempts to improve the situation by replacing the existing
overview for the helpers with a more developed description. Furthermore,
a Python script is added to generate a manual page for eBPF helpers. The
workflow is the following, and requires the rst2man utility:
$ ./scripts/bpf_helpers_doc.py \
--filename include/uapi/linux/bpf.h > /tmp/bpf-helpers.rst
$ rst2man /tmp/bpf-helpers.rst > /tmp/bpf-helpers.7
$ man /tmp/bpf-helpers.7
The objective is to keep all documentation related to the helpers in a
single place, and to be able to generate from here a manual page that
could be packaged in the man-pages repository and shipped with most
distributions.
Additionally, parsing the prototypes of the helper functions could
hopefully be reused, with a different Printer object, to generate
header files needed in some eBPF-related projects.
Regarding the description of each helper, it comprises several items:
- The function prototype.
- A description of the function and of its arguments (except for a
couple of cases, when there are no arguments and the return value
makes the function usage really obvious).
- A description of return values (if not void).
Additional items such as the list of compatible eBPF program and map
types for each helper, Linux kernel version that introduced the helper,
GPL-only restriction, and commit hash could be added in the future, but
it was decided on the mailing list to leave them aside for now.
For several helpers, descriptions are inspired (at times, nearly copied)
from the commit logs introducing them in the kernel--Many thanks to
their respective authors! Some sentences were also adapted from comments
from the reviews, thanks to the reviewers as well. Descriptions were
completed as much as possible, the objective being to have something easily
accessible even for people just starting with eBPF. There is probably a bit
more work to do in this direction for some helpers.
Some RST formatting is used in the descriptions (not in function
prototypes, to keep them readable, but the Python script provided in
order to generate the RST for the manual page does add formatting to
prototypes, to produce something pretty) to get "bold" and "italics" in
manual pages. Hopefully, the descriptions in bpf.h file remains
perfectly readable. Note that the few trailing white spaces are
intentional, removing them would break paragraphs for rst2man.
The descriptions should ideally be updated each time someone adds a new
helper, or updates the behaviour (new socket option supported, ...) or
the interface (new flags available, ...) of existing ones.
To ease the review process, the documentation has been split into several
patches.
v3 -> v4:
- Add a patch (#9) for newly added BPF helpers.
- Add a patch (#10) to update UAPI bpf.h version under tools/.
- Use SPDX tag in Python script.
- Several fixes on man page header and footer, and helpers documentation.
Please refer to individual patches for details.
RFC v2 -> PATCH v3:
Several fixes on man page header and footer, and helpers documentation.
Please refer to individual patches for details.
RFC v1 -> RFC v2:
- Remove "For" (compatible program and map types), "Since" (minimal
Linux kernel version required), "GPL only" sections and commit hashes
for the helpers.
- Add comment on top of the description list to explain how this
documentation is supposed to be processed.
- Update Python script accordingly (remove the same sections, and remove
paragraphs on program types and GPL restrictions from man page
header).
- Split series into several patches.
Cc: linux-doc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-man@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Quentin Monnet (10):
bpf: add script and prepare bpf.h for new helpers documentation
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (01-11)
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (12-22)
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (23-32)
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (33-41)
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (42-50)
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (51-57)
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (58-64)
bpf: add documentation for eBPF helpers (65-66)
bpf: update bpf.h uapi header for tools
include/uapi/linux/bpf.h | 1776 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
scripts/bpf_helpers_doc.py | 421 ++++++++++
tools/include/uapi/linux/bpf.h | 1776 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
3 files changed, 3181 insertions(+), 792 deletions(-)
create mode 100755 scripts/bpf_helpers_doc.py
--
2.14.1
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