3 ms·

are all the scripts/tools Brendan is talking about going to be open source? (I'm sure some of them are, including the ones on his Github)

brendangregg 7y ago
Yes. I've been working on a github repo that contains all the tools. It's not online yet.
- ayush--s 7y ago
  thank you so much, looking forward to the book
- dbancajas 7y ago
  Brendan, thanks for writing the book. Will definitely get this. As someone looking to always expand my skillset, do you think there will be a lot of demand for programmers who know BPF in the future/now? I'm always interested in low-level OS/internals. Current job is in HW design.
  - brendangregg 7y ago
    Yes, but what exactly varies on the role. Eg: - Developers and system engineers: will add the BCC and bpftrace tools to their toolkit for analyzing issues, but they won't necessarily need to develop new ones themselves (so long as someone at the company can, as needed). The book targets this (large) audience by covering over 150 tools. - Some developers will use the BPF tracers like bpftrace as a primary debugging tool as it's the best available for their language (eg, user and kernel C and C++); other mature runtimes may already have a tracer that developers are already using, making bpftrace a secondary debugging tool for digging deeper. In that case, you may find there is one or two people on a development team who learn bpftrace and deal with the deeper debugging, whereas others get by with their primary tracer. The book targets these audiences too, by explaining bpftrace programming and including many examples. - There's another smaller audience where there'll be BPF demand that is not the focus of the book: custom BPF products. In the past, a monitoring/security company might sell you a loadable kernel module to do their thing; in the future, those should all become BPF programs (where possible), which are safer to run. There will also be new applications made possible by BPF. Some of these products will be bpftrace/BCC-based, and the book will be helpful. So I'd expect to see some demand for these BPF skills too, although it's a much narrower audience than the others. It'll be companies trying to hire BPF programmers to migrate their kernel modules to. Some companies already sell such BPF things (Cilium, Sysdig).

brendangregg 7y ago

Yes. I've been working on a github repo that contains all the tools. It's not online yet.

ayush--s 7y ago
thank you so much, looking forward to the book
dbancajas 7y ago
Brendan, thanks for writing the book. Will definitely get this. As someone looking to always expand my skillset, do you think there will be a lot of demand for programmers who know BPF in the future/now? I'm always interested in low-level OS/internals. Current job is in HW design.
- brendangregg 7y ago
  Yes, but what exactly varies on the role. Eg: - Developers and system engineers: will add the BCC and bpftrace tools to their toolkit for analyzing issues, but they won't necessarily need to develop new ones themselves (so long as someone at the company can, as needed). The book targets this (large) audience by covering over 150 tools. - Some developers will use the BPF tracers like bpftrace as a primary debugging tool as it's the best available for their language (eg, user and kernel C and C++); other mature runtimes may already have a tracer that developers are already using, making bpftrace a secondary debugging tool for digging deeper. In that case, you may find there is one or two people on a development team who learn bpftrace and deal with the deeper debugging, whereas others get by with their primary tracer. The book targets these audiences too, by explaining bpftrace programming and including many examples. - There's another smaller audience where there'll be BPF demand that is not the focus of the book: custom BPF products. In the past, a monitoring/security company might sell you a loadable kernel module to do their thing; in the future, those should all become BPF programs (where possible), which are safer to run. There will also be new applications made possible by BPF. Some of these products will be bpftrace/BCC-based, and the book will be helpful. So I'd expect to see some demand for these BPF skills too, although it's a much narrower audience than the others. It'll be companies trying to hire BPF programmers to migrate their kernel modules to. Some companies already sell such BPF things (Cilium, Sysdig).