libbpf: Auto-bump RLIMIT_MEMLOCK if kernel needs it for BPF
The need to increase RLIMIT_MEMLOCK to do anything useful with BPF is
one of the first extremely frustrating gotchas that all new BPF users go
through and in some cases have to learn it a very hard way.
Luckily, starting with upstream Linux kernel version 5.11, BPF subsystem
dropped the dependency on memlock and uses memcg-based memory accounting
instead. Unfortunately, detecting memcg-based BPF memory accounting is
far from trivial (as can be evidenced by this patch), so in practice
most BPF applications still do unconditional RLIMIT_MEMLOCK increase.
As we move towards libbpf 1.0, it would be good to allow users to forget
about RLIMIT_MEMLOCK vs memcg and let libbpf do the sensible adjustment
automatically. This patch paves the way forward in this matter. Libbpf
will do feature detection of memcg-based accounting, and if detected,
will do nothing. But if the kernel is too old, just like BCC, libbpf
will automatically increase RLIMIT_MEMLOCK on behalf of user
application ([0]).
As this is technically a breaking change, during the transition period
applications have to opt into libbpf 1.0 mode by setting
LIBBPF_STRICT_AUTO_RLIMIT_MEMLOCK bit when calling
libbpf_set_strict_mode().
Libbpf allows to control the exact amount of set RLIMIT_MEMLOCK limit
with libbpf_set_memlock_rlim_max() API. Passing 0 will make libbpf do
nothing with RLIMIT_MEMLOCK. libbpf_set_memlock_rlim_max() has to be
called before the first bpf_prog_load(), bpf_btf_load(), or
bpf_object__load() call, otherwise it has no effect and will return
-EBUSY.
[0] Closes: https://github.com/libbpf/libbpf/issues/369
Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20211214195904.1785155-2-andrii@kernel.org
6 files changed