BCC is a compiler and a toolkit, containing powerful kernel tracing tools that
trace at the lowest levels, including adding hooks to functions in kernel space
and user space to deeply understand system behavior while being low in
overhead. Here's a presentation with an
overview and visit BCC's
project page for the official BCC
documentation.
adeb is the primary vehicle for running BCC on Android. It supports
preparing the target Android device with necessary kernel headers, cloning and
building BCC on device, and other setup. Take a look a quick look at adeb
README so that
you're familiar with what it is.
To download a prebuilt filesystem with BCC already built/installed for an ARM64
device, you can just run: adeb prepare --full
This downloads the FS and also downloads prebuilt kernel headers after
detecting your device's kernel version. Running BCC this way may cause a warning
at startup since the headers may not be an exact match for your kernel's
sublevel (only version and patchlevel are matched), however it works well in
our testing and could be used, as long as you can tolerate the warning.
If you would like to setup your own kernel headers and prevent the warning,
you can point adeb to the kernel sources which will extract headers from there: adeb prepare --full --kernelsrc /path/to/kernel-source/
For targets other than ARM64, see the Other Architectures
section
Now to run BCC, just start an adeb shell: adeb shell. This uses adb
as the backend to start a shell into your adeb environment. Try runningopensnoop or any of the other BCC tracers to confirm that the setup worked
correctly.
If building your own kernel, following are the kernel requirements:
You need kernel 4.9 or newer. Anything less needs backports. Your kernel needs
to be built with the following config options at the minimum: CONFIG_KPROBES=y CONFIG_KPROBE_EVENT=y CONFIG_BPF_SYSCALL=y
Optionally, CONFIG_UPROBES=y CONFIG_UPROBE_EVENT=y
Additionally, for the criticalsection BCC tracer to work, you need: CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT=y CONFIG_PREEMPTIRQ_EVENTS=y
If you would like the latest upstream BCC built and installed on your Android
device, you can run: adeb prepare --build --bcc --kernelsrc /path/to/kernel-source/
NOTE: This is a slow process and can take a long time. Since it not only builds
BCC but also installs all non-BCC debian packages onto the filesystem and configures them.
By default adeb assumes the target Android device is based on ARM64
processor architecture. For other architectures, use the --arch option. For
example for x86_64 architecture, run: adeb prepare --arch amd64 --build --bcc --kernelsrc /path/to/kernel-source/
Note: The --download option ignores the --arch flag. This is because we only
provide pre-built filesystems for ARM64 at the moment.
Note: If you pass --arch, you have to pass --build, because prebuilt
filesystems are not available for non-arm64 devices.
Here are some common issues you may face when running different BCC tools.
Symptom: This will usually result in an error like the following:
```
root@localhost:/# criticalstat
In file included from :2
In file included from /virtual/include/bcc/bpf.h:12:
In file included from include/linux/types.h:5:
include/uapi/linux/types.h:4:10: fatal error: 'asm/types.h' file not found
^~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 error generated.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./criticalstat.py", line 138, in
b = BPF(text=bpf_text)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bcc/__init__.py", line 297, in init
raise Exception("Failed to compile BPF text:\n%s" % text)
Exception: Failed to compile BPF text:
extern char _stext[];
```
CONFIG_KPROBES isn't enabled.Symptom: This will result in an error like the following: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/bcc/tools/cachetop", line 263, in <module> curses.wrapper(handle_loop, args) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/curses/wrapper.py", line 43, in wrapper return func(stdscr, *args, **kwds) File "/usr/share/bcc/tools/cachetop", line 172, in handle_loop b.attach_kprobe(event="add_to_page_cache_lru", fn_name="do_count") File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bcc/__init__.py", line 543, in attach_kprobe fn = self.load_func(fn_name, BPF.KPROBE) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bcc/__init__.py", line 355, in load_func (func_name, errstr)) Exception: Failed to load BPF program do_count: Invalid argument
CONFIG_BPF_SYSCALL isn't enabled.Symptom: This may result in a compilation error like the following:
```
root@localhost:/# cachetop
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/bcc/tools/cachetop", line 263, in
curses.wrapper(handle_loop, args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/curses/wrapper.py", line 43, in wrapper
return func(stdscr, *args, **kwds)
File "/usr/share/bcc/tools/cachetop", line 171, in handle_loop
b = BPF(text=bpf_text)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bcc/__init__.py", line 297, in init
raise Exception("Failed to compile BPF text:\n%s" % text)
Exception: Failed to compile BPF text:
#include <uapi/linux/ptrace.h>
struct key_t {
u64 ip;
u32 pid;
u32 uid;
char comm[16];
};
BPF_HASH(counts, struct key_t);
int do_count(struct pt_regs *ctx) {
struct key_t key = {};
u64 zero = 0 , *val;
u64 pid = bpf_get_current_pid_tgid();
u32 uid = bpf_get_current_uid_gid();
key.ip = PT_REGS_IP(ctx);
key.pid = pid & 0xFFFFFFFF;
key.uid = uid & 0xFFFFFFFF;
bpf_get_current_comm(&(key.comm), 16);
val = counts.lookup_or_init(&key, &zero); // update counter
(*val)++;
return 0;
}
```