# BPF Performance Tools

By Simon Hørup Eskildsen · 2020-03-07 · Book by Brendan Gregg, rated 4/5 · https://sirupsen.com/books/bpf-performance-tools

<p>Gregg's previous book, Systems Performance, manages to both be an excellent book on operating systems and observability tooling. If he wrote Systems Performance today, it'd use BPF-tools instead, which frankly would make it _the_ book. For now, you'll have to read both -- and read Systems Performance first.<br /><br />I see this book as an amendment to Systems Performance with "hey, we have BPF now, it's mega-powerful, and you should use that instead of system tap / whatever." It explains what BPF is: Finally we have a way to run user-code in the mainline kernel, which can aggregate whatever metrics we like with minimal overhead.<br /><br />He explains the different types of probes, how BCC and bpftrace add value on top of BPF, and techniques for efficiently using it. I think the level of detail here was great. The rest of the book is essentially a reference book with each tool, and a short description of how it works. I'm not sure how valuable I find this, given that the tools are all open-source and that anything but the title doesn't seem worth remembering. I skimmed through most of this, and don't see myself referencing it again, since all that's more readily available with Google.<br /><br />Again, as was my pet-peeve with Systems Performance, nothing about historical tooling. I can't not give four stars though. Hard to see who else could write this book. It's a joy to read something by someone who's such an expert in his field. The exercises are fantastic, and doing a few of them was the most value I derived from it.<br /></p>