uProbe: Observability for All Developers

#ebpf #aya #rust #tracing

When I finished my introduction to eBPF with Aya, I was already happy to have started to understand eBPF a little better, but I felt like I still had a lot to learn. In fact, we had mainly looked at Tracepoints, but I had deliberately left out the other types of eBPF programs because I had to make a choice so as not to get sidetracked.

So where to start now? There are about thirty of them (and not yet fifty at the time of writing this article). So I looked for a type of eBPF program that could be useful not only for Linux kernel developers or network experts, and that wasn't too complex. I opted for uProbes.

uProbes

What are they used for? Let's take an example: you've written a program in Go. You'd like to know how long it takes to execute a function. Instead of adding your code with println, uProbes give you a very clean answer and allow you to profile a function in your program without modifying a single line of code...