String kfuncs - simplifying string handling in eBPF programs

When it comes to string handling, C is not the most ergonomic language for the job. But, at least, the standard library provides a basic set of functions for finding characters, comparing strings, or finding sub-strings. The same has not been true for eBPF programs where developers had to implement all the operations manually by looking into individual bytes.

This has changed in kernel version 6.17, which added a set of eBPF kernel functions (so-called kfuncs) to perform the most common string processing operations. While implementing these sounded like a very straightforward job at the beginning (just call the in-kernel implementations of the respective functions, right?), it turned out that eBPF programs have a number of specifics which required the implementation to be much more complicated.

In this talk, I will walk you through this journey and show how and why the kfuncs have to be implemented differently from the in-kernel implementations. We'll also dive into the API specifics and demonstrate how string kfuncs have been adopted by bpftrace [1] and what benefits they brought.

[1] https://bpftrace.org/