[irogers]

prodfiler clearly has a market. It would be interesting to see the approach as something standard in the kernel tree, perhaps it can be added to perf's synthesis, etc. There is already BPF based profiling within perf to avoid file descriptor overheads. If engineering resources are the issue then this could be a good GSoC project: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/gsoc/2023-gsoc-perf

[javierhonduco]

This would be ideal. There's some great work by folks at Oracle in this space: SFrame (https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Binutils-SFrame) née ctf_frame that I hope will be integrated in the kernel.

As this will take few years, in the meantime I've developed a DWARF-based unwinder in BPF [0]. Some perf maintainers showed interest in this, so thanks for bringing up the GSoC project idea, didn't occur to me!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33788794

[tdullien]

Yeah. I really like the ideas proposed by Brendan Gregg -- essentially encouraging every HLL runtime to embed an eBPF-based unwinder in it's own executable. The upshot of that would be "generic, in-production unwinding of native code and HLL code", similar to what prodfiler is doing, but inside the main kernel tree...