Back in January 2023, we announced the availability of a new Bootlin training course “Linux debugging, profiling, tracing and performance analysis”, initially developed and taught by former Bootlin engineer Clement Léger. A year and a half later, the training course, now taught by Bootlin engineers Luca Ceresoli and Alexis Lothoré, is one of the most requested amongst Bootlin training courses.
Following the feedback received from many people who attended the course, we are happy to announce that a new version of the training is available and now includes a whole new part about eBPF technology !
eBPF (which stands for extended Berkeley Packet Filter) has been introduced in the Linux kernel ten years ago and is a powerful framework allowing to run user programs directly in the kernel, in a safe and efficient manner. eBPF keeps receiving updates very frequently, and is being more and more employed to create tools and infrastructures in various domains: networking, monitoring, debugging and diagnostic, security… Thanks to the wide variety of places in the kernel where eBPF program can be attached, it has naturally become a valuable tool to assist kernel users in debugging, tracing and profiling tasks.
The training update brings a whole new section with a complete walk-through guide about eBPF: its purpose, the general workflow, the core components and the standard frameworks available to use it. It also comes with a dedicated lab section, in which students write their own tracing tools in eBPF !
As usual for Bootlin trainings, the corresponding materials (slides, labs instructions and labs data) are publicly available and can be found on the training page.
Two public on-line sessions involving this new content are already scheduled, respectively on November 18-22 and December 2-6, and more sessions will of course be scheduled next year. You can also contact us for private on-line and private on-site sessions.
