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A possibly lighter weight alternative is libbpf-rs [0]. libbpf-rs is designed to take advantage of BPF's Compile-Once-Run-Everywhere functionality where you can ship a pre-compiled object file to production instead of an entire compiler toolchain.

Disclaimer: I wrote libbpf-rs.

[0]: https://github.com/libbpf/libbpf-rs

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Do people generally do that? Is this an artifact of people using iovisor/bcc and Python or whatever? We just build .o files with clang and ship 'em.

I use libbpf-sys but that’s user space

Yes. If you ship any eBPF programs that utilize kprobes and/or read kernel structures that change between kernel versions, you have portability problems. See https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/blog/2020/02/19/bpf... for a good overview of the problem that CO-RE intends to solve.

Ah! That makes so much sense. It hadn't occurred; when we rolled out BPF at Fly, the first thing we did was commit to standardize our kernels. After all, there's not much CO-RE can do about your BPF compiler not having tail calls, or not allowing bounded loops. But we're almost entirely XDP; I can see kernel structs being a much bigger problem for people doing observability work.

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