News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform by seneca on Thursday December 10, 2020 @12:42PM (#25376213)
Strongly disagree. BPF uprobes allow extremely fine grained tracing of userspace applications, and allow you to programmatically correlate them with kernel level information.
Re:New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform by morelisp on Friday December 11, 2020 @06:37AM (#25384616)
Sure, but "fine-grained tracing" is itself such a small part of observability even if BPF takes over that entire part of the stack it's still nowhere near a complete observability story.

This is outside my area of expertise so maybe I'm just missing some deeper insight - and I can see where you're coming from for traditional "throw the artifact over the wall, good luck running it" system operations kind of stuff. Or debugging services in production, which tracing is a key part of - but again just a small part of observability, and one that the rest of your dev process should be actively trying to minimize. If you have any degree of DevOps going on, many key SLIs will much higher-level (p99 of HTTP requests, MB of storage per customer), and I don't see how eBPF addresses that better than existing instrumentation, or in some cases at all.

Re:New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform by jeffbee on Thursday December 10, 2020 @02:53PM (#25377756)
Sure but it's also terribly expensive. Are you trying to give up 5-10% of your CPU time to observability?
Re:New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform by krab on Thursday December 10, 2020 @03:40PM (#25378326)
Gladly, if it doesn't influence latency much and it is presented intelligently in terms of my high level code.
Re:New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform by paulie_a on Thursday December 10, 2020 @03:19PM (#25378038)
Most CPUs are not hitting 100 percent anyways so what's a 10 percent loss?