Poor error message when BPF is stripped
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Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- C
- Stars
- 189
- Forks
- 23
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Description
(Reported by Leah Neukirchen.)
If the bpf in /usr/lib64/dtrace is stripped, it is wrecked (we need the symbol table to figure out what to load), but we don't diagnose this: instead, we just emit a 'could not enable tracing' message.
It should be easy enough to validate that the bpf library has at least one known symbol in it and fail with a better error if not :)
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by locating the BPF loading path used for libraries under /usr/lib64/dtrace and reproduce the failure with a stripped BPF library. Check how the current generic "could not enable tracing" error is emitted; done means the missing symbol table produces a specific diagnostic instead.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- c
- Domain
- observability-sre, operating-systems
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 2/5
- Estimated time
- 1-3 hours
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100