Re: [PATCH bpf-next 0/6] samples/bpf: Remove unmaintained XDP sample utilities

Alexei Starovoitov
2023-08-22T19:27:38Z

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 7:23 AM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> The samples/bpf directory in the kernel tree started out as a way of showcasing
> different aspects of BPF functionality by writing small utility programs for
> each feature. However, as the BPF subsystem has matured, the preferred way of
> including userspace code with a feature has become the BPF selftests, which also
> have the benefit of being consistently run as part of the BPF CI system.
>
> As a result of this shift, the utilities in samples/bpf have seen little love,
> and have slowly bitrotted. There have been sporadic cleanup patches over the
> years, but it's clear that the utilities are far from maintained.
>
> For XDP in particular, some of the utilities have been used as benchmarking aids
> when implementing new kernel features, which seems to be the main reason they
> have stuck around; any updates the utilities have seen have been targeted at
> this use case. However, as the BPF subsystem as a whole has moved on, it has
> become increasingly difficult to incorporate new features into these utilities
> because they predate most of the modern BPF features (such as kfuncs and BTF).
>
> Rather than try to update these utilities and keep maintaining them in the
> kernel tree, we have ported the useful features of the utilities to the
> xdp-tools package. In the porting process we also updated the utilities to take
> advantage of modern BPF features, integrated them with libxdp, and polished the
> user interface.
>
> As these utilities are standalone tools, maintaining them out of tree is
> simpler, and we plan to keep maintaining them in the xdp-tools repo. To direct
> users of these utilities to the right place, this series removes the utilities
> from samples/bpf, leaving in place only a couple of utilities whose
> functionality have not yet been ported to xdp-tools.
>
> The xdp-tools repository is located on Github at the following URL:
>
> https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-tools

Could you add this link with details to samples/bpf/README.rst,
so that folks know where to look for them?

Other than that the set makes sense to me.