Hi,

Is it possible to load a BPF program at boot time?
What I'm trying to achieve is to trace every single call to a certain
function since the kernel starts, without missing anything.

More specifically, I'm trying to debug iommu_alloc failures by looking
at the stacktrace to find out which subsystem/driver allocated too
many IOMMU slots on a ppc64le system, which I do not have direct
access to.

I've considered writing a systemd unit file that loads a BPF program
before the sysinit target[1], but I'm not sure if that's early enough.
An alternative seems to be to use boot-time tracing with ftrace[2]
instead (which I end up doing), but it requires recompiling the kernel
inorder to add tracepoints to retrieve the function call arguments,
and there isn't an easy way to stop tracing to prevent the tracing
buffer overflows (I end up writing a systemd unit file that sets a
ftrace event trigger that turns off tracing).

Maybe there is a better way to do something like this?


Much thanks,
Shung-Hsi Yu

[1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/bootup.html
[2]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/trace/boottime-trace.html