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Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Powerful, scriptable eBPF tracing for Linux with awk-like syntax
bpftrace offers an awk‑style language to write eBPF one‑liners and scripts that probe kernel and user‑space events on Linux.
bpftrace provides a high‑level, awk‑inspired scripting language that compiles to eBPF bytecode, enabling developers, sysadmins, and performance engineers to instrument both kernel and user‑space code with minimal overhead.
Using libbpf and bcc under the hood, bpftrace supports kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints, raw syscalls, hardware counters, and interval timers. Its built‑in aggregation functions—count, sum, hist, and more—let you create concise one‑liners or full scripts for tasks such as syscall latency histograms, cache‑miss tracking, or per‑process I/O monitoring. The language’s C‑like syntax and standard library simplify complex tracing scenarios without requiring deep eBPF expertise.
bpftrace runs on any modern Linux distribution with a recent kernel that includes eBPF support. Installation is straightforward via package managers or source builds. The project is Apache‑2.0 licensed, actively maintained, and offers editor plugins for Emacs, Vim, VS Code, and Bash completion, fostering a vibrant community of contributors and users.
When teams consider bpftrace, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Identify high‑latency syscalls per process
Generate per‑process histograms of syscall durations to pinpoint bottlenecks.
Monitor cache‑miss rates for performance tuning
Count hardware cache‑miss events per thread, enabling CPU cache optimization.
Audit file access in a specific cgroup
List filenames opened by processes within a cgroup, supporting security audits.
Profile user‑space stack traces at custom frequency
Collect stack samples for a target PID at 99 Hz, revealing hot paths in applications.
It draws inspiration from awk, C, DTrace, and SystemTap, offering a familiar, concise scripting style.
It compiles scripts to eBPF bytecode and uses libbpf and bcc to interact with kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints, and hardware counters.
Plugins are available for Emacs, Vim, VS Code, and Bash completion, enabling syntax highlighting and command completion.
Yes, its low‑overhead eBPF backend makes it safe for live systems, though scripts should be tested to avoid excessive data collection.
The project is released under the Apache‑2.0 license.
Project at a glance
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