How Do I Profile eBPF Code?
The article outlines a method for profiling eBPF code by measuring the performance impact of file open operations using a minimal C benchmark. It details the required kernel settings, symbol exposure steps, and the use of the perf tool with specific options to capture kernel‑mode cycles and call stacks. Finally, it provides commands for running the benchmark with CPU pinning and high priority to obtain reliable latency statistics.
- ▪A simple C test harness is provided to repeatedly open a file and record the time taken for each operation, discarding the first 10% of measurements as warm‑up.
- ▪Kernel sysctl settings are adjusted to enable BPF JIT compilation and expose JIT symbols so perf can resolve program names.
- ▪The perf command is configured to record CPU cycles in kernel mode, capture call graphs using frame pointers, and sample at a non‑round frequency to avoid periodic alignment.
- ▪Benchmark execution is pinned to a specific CPU core and given real‑time priority with taskset and chrt to minimize scheduling noise.
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| Original publisher | naveen srinivasan |
| Canonical URL | https://naveensrinivasan.com/posts/2026-07-22-how-do-i-profile-ebpf-code/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:55:44 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T16:15:32.640Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T16:15:32.640Z |
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How Do I Profile eBPF Code?If we are running any eBPF workload or writing eBPF code, we want to measure its performance impact, and in this post we will demonstrate an example of how to do it.In this example, our goal is to measure the performance of file open operations, one of the most critical functions in the OS. Our code used file open hooks in eBPF, we wanted to measure the performance overhead introduced by adding this hook.To identify likely bottlenecks, we need a simple C test harness with the fewest dependencies, designed to measure file open performance.#define _GNU_SOURCE #include <fcntl.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <time.h> #include <stdint.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <sched.h> #include <sys/mman.h> #include <sys/syscall.h> static inline uint64_t…
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