Linux kernel tracing superpowers in the cloud

The Linux 4.x series introduced a new powerful engine of programmable tracing (BPF) that allows to actually look inside the kernel at runtime. This talk will show you how to exploit this engine in order to debug problems or identify performance bottlenecks in a complex environment like a cloud.

This talk will cover the latest Linux superpowers that allow to see what is happening “under the hood” of the Linux kernel at runtime. I will explain how to exploit these “superpowers” to measure and trace complex events at runtime in a cloud environment. For example, we will see how we can measure latency distribution of filesystem I/O, details of storage device operations, like individual block I/O request timeouts, or TCP buffer allocations, investigating stack traces of certain events, identify memory leaks, performance bottlenecks and a whole lot more.