On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 07:19:29PM -0800, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 09:35:59AM -0500, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote:
Introduce in-kernel headers and other artifacts which are made available as an archive through proc (/proc/kheaders.txz file). This archive makes it possible to build kernel modules, run eBPF programs, and other tracing programs that need to extend the kernel for tracing purposes without any dependency on the file system having headers and build artifacts.
On Android and embedded systems, it is common to switch kernels but not have kernel headers available on the file system. Raw kernel headers also cannot be copied into the filesystem like they can be on other distros, due to licensing and other issues. There's no linux-headers package on Android. Further once a different kernel is booted, any headers stored on the file system will no longer be useful. By storing the headers as a compressed archive within the kernel, we can avoid these issues that have been a hindrance for a long time.
The set looks good to me and since the main use case is building bpf progs I can route it via bpf-next tree if there are no objections. Masahiro, could you please ack it?
Yes, eBPF is one of the usecases. After this, I am also planning to send patches to BCC so that it can use this feature when compiling C to eBPF.
Thanks!
- Joel