aya VS libbpf-sys

In my last article, I briefly explained starting a project with rust-aya, including using their scaffolding generator. If you need a refresher, feel free to revisit that article or check the rust-aya documentation.

The scaffolding provided by rust-aya includes everything we need to start building our program. By specifying the program type in the command, as we did with program_type=xdp, it sets up the necessary base for that specific type of program. For more detailed information on how all this works, it's a good idea to check out the documentation on the rust-aya website.

https://github.com/aya-rs/aya is very interesting, used to power this.

Would love to see the final results of this hacking in a git repo.

Now I'm back to learning about eBPF with the help of this great book by Liz Rice. I'm using libbpf-rs and converting the book examples into Rust (except for the actual bpf programs, which are in C, I have plans of coming back and converting everything to Rust with aya). If you're interested in eBPF stuff, and want to check out it with Rust here is my repo which could be helpful (almost every piece of code is commented).

In case anyone was wondering, the link to the Aya book towards the end of this post is wrong. It points you to:

https://aya-rs.dev/

Which has almost no content other than a spartan TOC. The actual book URL is here:

https://aya-rs.dev/book/

[GitHub - aya-rs/aya: Aya is an eBPF library for the Rust programming language, built with a focus on developer experience and operability.](https://github.com/aya-rs/aya) [GitHub - kentik/convis](https://github.com/kentik/convis) [Implement an eBPF decompiler/disassembler · Issue #838 · capstone-engine/capstone · GitHub](https://github.com/capstone-engine/capstone/issues/838)

The biggest difference is that it doesn't depend on or call into libbpf (pure Rust). The interface is also intended to make it really easy to manage lots of different probes that may or may not load across several kernel versions, so you can write-once-run-anywhere. The motivations are pretty similar to aya, but with a more limited feature set and emphasis on production stability across many kernels.

Use and contribute to Aya, an open source eBPF library for Rust https://github.com/aya-rs/aya

In the middle of a shell script or makefile recipe, this can be hard to spot, and it may take a while to realise why it’s actually failing. I recently hit a messy race condition related to this: https://github.com/alexforster/libbpf-sys/commit/e65b4962e7d... (described in the commit message).

I’ve been wondering about filing bugs against zsh and bash to be a little bit cleverer about their error message in this specific case (attempting to redirect to a file in a nonexistent directory).