First thing first, I will give this book Highly Recommended.
The author is famous for his work on systems performance for long, including marvelous DTrace Toolkits, flame graph, heat map... I also follow his wonderful website for several years. When the author announced his plan to publish a book about BPF, I wait for the date coming and it really didn't let me disappointed. :-)
This books contains 4 parts. The first 2 parts are the meats. Part I describes the technologies will be used in part II. It contains what is BPF, what is BCC, what is bpftrace. And the most important: what mechanisms under the hood. It's so important that people need to know enough underneath to use the high-level tools well that they would not run into the corners of the limitations of tools frequently. Although author suggests readers can skim the Chapter 2, Technology Background, I highly recommend you not to.
Part II starts the real topics about this book: Performance Analysis. It starts from CPU, which is usually the start point we do performance analysis. It describes some basic CPU terms and kernel schedulers. Be careful you know the every single detail for the background. If not clear enough, it might indicate that you need to enhance your basic knowledge to fully understand this book. Not necessary to find your college textbooks, just make sure you can understand the terms in the book. Then the traditional tools come first to provide what we can get from them. After this, we would find some things missing from traditional tools. So related BPF tools invented and help to fulfill the gaps. The rest of the Part II adds more and more aspects of a system, including memory, filesystem, disk I/O, network, application, kernel...
Part III contains even more BPF tools not mentioned in Part II but can be useful sometimes. Part IV introduces some useful one-liners and lower level development for BPF tools for those want to know more.
All in all, this book is a solid performance book for experienced engineers who want to know what BPF can do for their daily work. It's also helpful for newbies to learn systems from an interesting perspective since BPF can help them investigate the operations through the white-box approach.
I also joined a study group here in Taiwan. We bi-weekly discuss some chapters and share some other meterials we think relevant (mostly in Traditional Chinese). You might also want to check it.
The author is famous for his work on systems performance for long, including marvelous DTrace Toolkits, flame graph, heat map... I also follow his wonderful website for several years. When the author announced his plan to publish a book about BPF, I wait for the date coming and it really didn't let me disappointed. :-)
This books contains 4 parts. The first 2 parts are the meats. Part I describes the technologies will be used in part II. It contains what is BPF, what is BCC, what is bpftrace. And the most important: what mechanisms under the hood. It's so important that people need to know enough underneath to use the high-level tools well that they would not run into the corners of the limitations of tools frequently. Although author suggests readers can skim the Chapter 2, Technology Background, I highly recommend you not to.
Part II starts the real topics about this book: Performance Analysis. It starts from CPU, which is usually the start point we do performance analysis. It describes some basic CPU terms and kernel schedulers. Be careful you know the every single detail for the background. If not clear enough, it might indicate that you need to enhance your basic knowledge to fully understand this book. Not necessary to find your college textbooks, just make sure you can understand the terms in the book. Then the traditional tools come first to provide what we can get from them. After this, we would find some things missing from traditional tools. So related BPF tools invented and help to fulfill the gaps. The rest of the Part II adds more and more aspects of a system, including memory, filesystem, disk I/O, network, application, kernel...
Part III contains even more BPF tools not mentioned in Part II but can be useful sometimes. Part IV introduces some useful one-liners and lower level development for BPF tools for those want to know more.
All in all, this book is a solid performance book for experienced engineers who want to know what BPF can do for their daily work. It's also helpful for newbies to learn systems from an interesting perspective since BPF can help them investigate the operations through the white-box approach.
I also joined a study group here in Taiwan. We bi-weekly discuss some chapters and share some other meterials we think relevant (mostly in Traditional Chinese). You might also want to check it.
留言
張貼留言