Virtual Rejekts 2020

Inspektor Gadget and traceloop: BPF debugging tools for Kubernetes
04-01, 09:35–10:05 (UTC), Track 1 (UTC)

I will present Inspektor Gadget and traceloop, a tracing tool to trace system calls in cgroups or in containers using BPF and overwritable ring buffers.

Many people use the “strace” tool to synchronously trace system calls using ptrace. Traceloop similarly traces system calls but asynchronously in the background, using BPF and tracing per cgroup. I’ll show how it is integrated with Kubernetes via Inspektor Gadget.

Traceloop's traces are recorded in a fast, in-memory, overwritable ring buffer like a flight recorder. As opposed to “strace”, the tracing could be permanently enabled on systemd services or Kubernetes pods and inspected in case of a crash. This is like a always-on “strace in the past”.

Alban is CTO & co-founder at Kinvolk. He has a particular interest in integrating BPF into Kubernetes. He’s a maintainer of the gobpf library and has worked on software in the cloud space using BPF with Golang: Weave Scope, Traceleft, Project Calico, and recently Inspektor Gadget and Traceloop.