Advanced BPF Profiling Techniques - How to Escape the Curse of NMI and Fetch ELF Contents at Runtime

Explore advanced BPF profiling techniques that overcome the limitations of Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) contexts and enable runtime ELF content fetching in this 38-minute conference talk from the Linux Plumbers Conference. Learn how to move beyond basic BPF-based profilers by mastering techniques for reliable user data capture that bypass NMI and non-sleepable context restrictions. Discover recent advancements in the BPF tracing domain that allow programs to escape NMI context limitations and perform reliable user memory reading in sleepable BPF mode. Understand how to fetch thread-local variable contents at runtime without upfront preprocessing by dynamically retrieving ELF binary contents on demand, opening new possibilities for sophisticated profiling applications.