selftest/bpf: Add BPF triggering benchmark
authorAndrii Nakryiko <andriin@fb.com>
Tue, 12 May 2020 19:24:45 +0000 (12:24 -0700)
committerAlexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Wed, 13 May 2020 19:19:38 +0000 (12:19 -0700)
commitc5d420c32cb44fdd10d76f0f01bcd0b09383d0b5
tree4c9bb7338b851dc010ee408e7b833677de98d190
parent4eaf0b5c5e04c21a866431bd763ab4b1f24c4d16
selftest/bpf: Add BPF triggering benchmark

It is sometimes desirable to be able to trigger BPF program from user-space
with minimal overhead. sys_enter would seem to be a good candidate, yet in
a lot of cases there will be a lot of noise from syscalls triggered by other
processes on the system. So while searching for low-overhead alternative, I've
stumbled upon getpgid() syscall, which seems to be specific enough to not
suffer from accidental syscall by other apps.

This set of benchmarks compares tp, raw_tp w/ filtering by syscall ID, kprobe,
fentry and fmod_ret with returning error (so that syscall would not be
executed), to determine the lowest-overhead way. Here are results on my
machine (using benchs/run_bench_trigger.sh script):

  base      :    9.200 ± 0.319M/s
  tp        :    6.690 ± 0.125M/s
  rawtp     :    8.571 ± 0.214M/s
  kprobe    :    6.431 ± 0.048M/s
  fentry    :    8.955 ± 0.241M/s
  fmodret   :    8.903 ± 0.135M/s

So it seems like fmodret doesn't give much benefit for such lightweight
syscall. Raw tracepoint is pretty decent despite additional filtering logic,
but it will be called for any other syscall in the system, which rules it out.
Fentry, though, seems to be adding the least amoung of overhead and achieves
97.3% of performance of baseline no-BPF-attached syscall.

Using getpgid() seems to be preferable to set_task_comm() approach from
test_overhead, as it's about 2.35x faster in a baseline performance.

Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andriin@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Acked-by: John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200512192445.2351848-5-andriin@fb.com
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/Makefile
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/bench.c
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/benchs/bench_trigger.c [new file with mode: 0644]
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/benchs/run_bench_trigger.sh [new file with mode: 0755]
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/progs/trigger_bench.c [new file with mode: 0644]