Brendan Gregg

JULY 4, 2021

It's an exciting time for developments in computer performance, not just for the BPF technology (which I often [write about]) but also for processors with 3D stacking and cloud vendor CPUs (e.g., This was a chance to talk about other things I've been working on, such as the present and future of hardware performance.

Performance 140

Performance Latency Hardware Storage 140

Brendan Gregg

JUNE 14, 2021

For USENIX LISA2021 I gave a 40 minute deep dive talk on BPF internals for Linux, focusing on observability tracing tools. Since there are already BPF internals references online (listed in this post) I used the opportunity to create some new content, showing how bpftrace instrumentation works from user space down to machine code.

Website 52

Website Code Performance 52

Brendan Gregg

JULY 14, 2020

Eight years ago I wrote _Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud_ (aka the "sysperf" book) on the performance of computing systems, and this year I'm excited to be releasing the second edition. A year ago I announced [BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability].

Systems 52

Systems Cloud Performance Tuning 52

Brendan Gregg

JULY 14, 2020

Eight years ago I wrote _Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud_ (aka the "sysperf" book) on the performance of computing systems, and this year I'm excited to be releasing the second edition. A year ago I announced [BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability].

Systems 52

Systems Cloud Performance Tuning 52

Brendan Gregg

JUNE 3, 2021

I was an independent performance consultant and Sun Microsystems had just released DTrace, a tool that could instrument all software. This gave performance analysts like myself X-ray vision. tools (2006). After it loaded, he showed how you could run one of several DTrace tools by double clicking an icon.

Open Source 144

Open Source Code Engineering Technology 144

Brendan Gregg

DECEMBER 21, 2019

For my AWS re:Invent talk on BPF Performance Analysis at Netflix, I began with a demo of "BPF superpowers" (aka eBPF). astype(numpy.int16) sound = pygame.sndarray.make_sound(note[0]) # BPF b = BPF(text=""" #include <uapi/linux/ptrace.h> My [BPF Performance Tools] book has plenty of examples.

C++ 52

C++ Education Java AWS 52

Brendan Gregg

DECEMBER 21, 2019

For my AWS re:Invent talk on BPF Performance Analysis at Netflix, I began with a demo of "BPF superpowers" (aka eBPF). from __future__ import print_function from bcc import BPF import pygame, numpy, pygame.sndarray # Sound setup sampleRate = 44100 pygame.mixer.pre_init(sampleRate, -16, 1). The source is: #!/usr/local/bin/bpftrace

C++ 52

C++ Education Java AWS 52

Brendan Gregg

MARCH 7, 2020

Systems performance is an effective discipline for performance analysis and tuning, and can help you find performance wins for your applications and the kernel. However, most of us are not performance or kernel engineers, and have limited time to study this topic.

Systems 52

Systems Performance Benchmarking Tuning 52

Brendan Gregg

MARCH 7, 2020

Systems performance is an effective discipline for performance analysis and tuning, and can help you find performance wins for your applications and the kernel. However, most of us are not performance or kernel engineers, and have limited time to study this topic.

Systems 52

Systems Performance Benchmarking Tuning 52

Brendan Gregg

JULY 4, 2021

It's an exciting time for developments in computer performance, not just for the BPF technology (which I often [write about]) but also for processors with 3D stacking and cloud vendor CPUs (e.g., This was a chance to talk about other things I've been working on, such as the present and future of hardware performance.

Performance 52

Performance Latency Hardware Storage 52

Brendan Gregg

NOVEMBER 3, 2020

Two new technologies, BTF and CO-RE, are paving the way for BPF to become a billion-dollar industry. BTF and CO-RE eliminate these dependencies at runtime, not only making BPF more practical for embedded Linux environments, but for adoption everywhere. The BCC project has a collection of these, called [libbpf tools].

C++ 40

C++ Programming Storage Code 40

Brendan Gregg

NOVEMBER 3, 2020

Two new technologies, BTF and CO-RE, are paving the way for BPF to become a billion-dollar industry. BTF and CO-RE eliminate these dependencies at runtime, not only making BPF more practical for embedded Linux environments, but for adoption everywhere. The BCC project has a collection of these, called [libbpf tools].

C++ 40

C++ Programming Storage Code 40

Brendan Gregg

JULY 2, 2021

There's an arms race to add [eBPF] (BPF) to commercial observability products, and in this post I'll describe how to quickly do that. People like to show me their BPF observability products after they have prototyped or built them, but I often wish I had given them advice before they started. You might not even like BPF.

Open Source 40

Open Source Latency Cache Energy 40

Brendan Gregg

JUNE 3, 2021

I was an independent performance consultant and Sun Microsystems had just released DTrace, a tool that could instrument all software. This gave performance analysts like myself X-ray vision. tools (2006) As I wasn't a Sun Microsystems employee I wasn't privy to Sun's internal projects. DTraceToolkit v0.96 Yeah, sure."

Open Source 40

Open Source Code Engineering Technology 40