Gaining eBPF vision: A new way to trace Linux filesystem disk requests

When Brendan Gregg gave his Performance Analysis superpowers with Linux BPF talk during the Open Source Summit in Los Angeles last year, he wasn’t messing around. Using the new eBPF tracing tools really feels like you gained some x-ray vision powers since, suddenly, opening the program’s hood is no longer necessary to see in details how it is behaving internally. Here’s a real-world use case of eBPF tracing to understand file access patterns in the Linux kernel and optimize large applications.