5–7 Oct 2026
Europe/Prague timezone

20 years of pahole : alive and kicking!

Not scheduled
45m
LPC Refereed Track LPC Refereed Track

Speaker

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo (Red Hat Inc.)

Description

The first cset for pahole is from October 24, 2006, a long time ago, from the first goals of helping reorganize the Linux kernel networking data structures, that was done beyond my expectations, helping countless open source projects to view its data structures with great precision and flexibility, to becoming a swiss army knife tool to convert type information from DWARF to CTF and, crucially, to BTF, becoming part of the kernel build process to enable BPF CO-RE, it has kept earning its keep.

Recent advances in DWARF tag and language support, plus features that exist but aren't well publicized, are subjects I want to communicate.

Coverage analysis, a quickly growing set of regression tests, support for DWARF tags for C++ and Rust concepts, support for DWZ, partial units, supporting modern DWARF present in distro userlands are topics of recent improvement that, by the 20th anniversary, will surely be ready to talk about.

Integration with perf, namely in having pahole and perf work together in areas such as data-type profiling has been a perennial source of requests that, by now, with some help from new and controversial friends, should finally become a reality.

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