MEng Project - Accelerating network communication patterns using eBPF

1. The following dependencies are needed (note clang+llvm-12 is required):

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt install -y build-essential pkgconf git make gcc clang-12 llvm-12 libelf-dev gcc-multilib

1. Ensure you have installed liburing and its headers on your system:

   $ git clone https://github.com/axboe/liburing

   $ cd liburing

   $ ./configure && make

   $ sudo make install

2. Clone this project (and all the submodules) using:

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.doc.ic.ac.uk/ac3419/meng-project.git

4. Build and install libbpf on your system (included as a submodule inside sgbpf):

   $ cd meng-project/sgbpf/dep/libbpf/src

   $ make all

   $ sudo DESTDIR=root make install

   $ sudo make install_headers

   $ sudo make install_uapi_headers

0. This assumes you have followed the steps above and installed all the required dependencies.

1. Create a new directory. For this example, it will be called my-project.

2. Add a Makefile pointing to the correct libbpf and sgbpf locations (see my-project/Makefile).

3. Write your program using the sgbpf library (see my-project/main.cpp for an example).

4. Run make install to build libbpf and sgbpf libraries.

5. Run make to build your program.

   1. If you get a linker error (eg: undefined references), try re-running make install and then make.

6. Now, you need to build the BPF object files that contain the programs that will be loaded into the kernel:

   1. You may optionally set the OUTPUT_BPF_OBJ_DIR environment variable to a (full) directory in which the built object files will be placed. If ommitted, the object files will be placed under bpfobj/ in the sgbpf directory by default.

   2. You are required to set the CUSTOM_AGGREGATION_BPF_PROG environment variable which should be the FULL path to your source file written in C containing the custom aggregation logic in a XDP program (which must be named aggregation_prog). See the example in my-project/custom_aggregation.bpf.c. Example (from inside my-project): export CUSTOM_AGGREGATION_BPF_PROG=$(pwd)/custom_aggregation.bpf.c

   3. Now, run make --directory=<path/to/sgbpf> bpf to build all required BPF object files.

7. Create a line-separated config file containing a list of worker endpoints, in the format: IPv4_Address:Port (see the example in my-project).

8. Run your program: sudo ./sg_program <path/to/bpfobjs> lo (remember that to load BPF programs, you need admin privileges).

Note: When running the loader program, if you get a message about the missing shared library libbpf.so.1, you can copy the missing shared object to lib/x86_64-linux-gnu from the build inside libbpf/src using: sudo cp sgbpf/dep/libbpf/src/libbpf.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/