[LLVMdev] Make BPF backend non-experimental?

[Alexei Starovoitov]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 10:46 AM, Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com> wrote:
> As one of the people who has worked with and reviewed the BPF port I'm in
> favor of this move.
>
> Reasons:
>
> 1) Alexei has been very active on the port, fixing problems unprompted
> 2) As one of the people who've had to had on it in the last few months it
> wasn't an issue to keep up to date with the other ports.
>
> Unless there are objections by EOD Monday I feel confident making the call
> here and having Alexei add it to the list of official targets.

Thanks Eric!
Bumping the thread one more time.

>
> -eric
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 9:59 AM Alexei Starovoitov
> <alexei.starovoitov at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I'd like to propose to upgrade BPF backend to first class citizen.
>>
>> Current status of it:
>> - used with linux kernel on x64, arm64, s390 architectures
>> - projects that use it: perf, tc, ovs
>> - there are few front-ends in the works:
>>  . one is translating custom language to C and then using clang/llvm
>>  . another is generating llvm IR directly
>>  . yet another is using clang rewriter to augment C language
>>  for tracing/networking needs
>>  . one project tried to hack clang overall and was abandoned
>>  . p4->bpf project was announced yesterday
>> - I've seen people embedding binary llc with bpf support
>>  in their github projects.
>> - broken llvm build with bpf backend was reported many
>>  times with few folks even provided simple patches to unbreak it.
>> - we've started to prepare buildbot specific to bpf, but hit
>>  configuration issues with zorg. Hopefully it will be functional soon.
>> - as far as I can see all across the board api refactoring that
>>  was done by a bunch of people over the last 5 month
>>  didn't cause any problems for them or for the backend
>> - it was accidentally included in the last night builds and
>>   reverted today. There were no buildbot issues (afaik)
>> - recent press:
>> http://brendangregg.com/blog/2015-05-15/ebpf-one-small-step.html
>>
>> bpf backend has been in-tree since January and has quite a few
>> users, so I think it's time to graduate it from experimental.
>>
>> Thanks!