Oracle Developing "bpftune" For BPF-Based, Automatic Tuning Of Linux Systems

Well, here is something nifty being worked on by Oracle. Oracle engineers have been developing "bpftune" as a new always-on, automatic tuning of Linux systems -- in particular, the many different Linux kernel tunables available and this tuning system leverages the kernel's Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) observability features to carry out its work.

With many system loads benefiting from dynamic tuning of the kernel, bpftune is a new automatic configurator being worked on by Oracle that aims to set correct kernel parameters based on the system state. Bpftune is continuously monitoring and adjusting the system behavior via the Linux kernel BPF functionality. Initially bpftune is looking at some of the most common issues around kernel tunables while can be extended for supporting an expanded set of features.

Oracle's bpftune currently can handle tuning around network congestion, neighbor table tuning, sysctl tuning, TCP buffer controls, network buffer settings, and more.

Oracle's Alan Maguire explains their interest in bpftune and the increasing need for automatic tuning or good defaults out-of-the-box:

"Even as the number of sysctls in the kernel grows, individual systems get a lot less care and adminstrator attention than they used to; phrases like “cattle not pets” exemplify this. Given the modern cloud architectures used for most deployments, most systems never have any human adminstrator interaction after initial provisioning; in fact given the scale requirements, this is often an explicit design goal - “no ssh’ing in!”.

These two observations are not unrelated; in an earlier era of fewer, larger systems, tuning by administrators was more feasible.

These trends - system complexity combined with minimal admin interaction suggest a rethink in terms of tunable management."

Learn more about bpftune from the Oracle Linux blog. It's a great initiative and hopefully will take off and see a diverse set of automatic tuning capabilities for Linux systems.

Those running Oracle Linux can easily install bpftune right now using DNF. Oracle has the bpftune code as open-source under a GPLv2 license and is available from GitHub.