abpfiff

A library to interact with BPF kernel state.

Just simple, pure idiomatic Rust-based bindings to manage user-space state necessary for interacting with the kernel system. Some little helpers are added but not beyond the minimalism (avoids generics or extra dependencies).

The name is bacronym for:

A BPF InterFace Foundation

Goals

In decreasing order of priority.

• Safer than direct system calls
• Pure Rust code, no C dependency
• Minimal dependencies for OS interaction
• Efficient

Non-Goals:

• Replacement for libbpf
• A C interface, to be re-evaluated later
• An async style of implementation. It should be possible to achieve all functionality with synchronous code. However, optional concurrency may be introduced with async where efficient.
• Binary analysis and manipulation of BPF programs

Implementation

Note that the implementation does not need link directly against any libc functions. Rather, it defines an expected interface in terms of free C functions (sys::SysVTable). The caller can fill it with functions loaded statically or dynamically from a linker but also with another equivalent implementation. Unfortunately, the data type definitions will have to be compatible with the platform libc in both cases, but it is a start to avoid the hell of LD_PRELOAD as a stupid, global mechanism for overwriting them.

Motivation

Depending on libbpf is quite heavy when only a fraction of it is needed. In particular, connecting together networking functionality does not depend on writing BPF. Also, the library is riddled with C-isms:

• unknown or highly implicit thread-safety

• synchronous resources opened and closed in rapid succession just to hide that resource management complexity from the caller. No really, a new netlink socket is created, configured, loop polled and closed for literally each libbpf_netlink_send_recv that's hidden in a lot of operations.

• Code that looks like so:

  static int libbpf_netlink_send_recv(...) {
      /* ... */
      req->nh.nlmsg_seq = time(NULL);
  

  They are fucking with us, no?