Release schedule for recent bpftrace, bcc and trace-runner?

[jesseward]

It's been some time since a release was published for kubectl trace. I notice that the iovisor bpftrace images are now lagging behind what Ubuntu has bundled 24.04(v0.20.2) as well. Are there plans to package a new release to get things to current?

Changes in the ecosystem since the v0.1.2 release

• bpftrace project is no longer publishing Docker images, it looks as though the project has moved to appimage releases?
• The version of bpftrace consumed (bpftrace v0.11.1) is now quite stale. There have been many useful additions to the language since that release (looping/iterations on maps, more built-ins/functions) and BTF support has been improved upon in newer builds..
• kubectl-trace has added support for output/uploading to GCS in main ..

FWIW, I have used the following revised Dockerfile.tracerunner to perform tests against GKE (recent COS versions) and it appears to be working well. This can be used against to build against the last released branch (git checkout v0.1.2) and launch using your custom image (eg: kubectl trace run <HOSTNAME> --imagename "<CUSTOM-DOCKER-REPO>/kubectl-trace:latest". This will get you bpftrace 0.20.2 that integrates well with COS BTF enabled kernels.

FROM golang:1.21-bullseye as gobuilder
ARG GIT_ORG=iovisor
ENV GIT_ORG=$GIT_ORG
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y make bash git && apt-get clean

ADD . /go/src/github.com/iovisor/kubectl-trace
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/iovisor/kubectl-trace
RUN make _output/bin/trace-runner

FROM ubuntu:24.04

# bpftrace && bcc are now installed from Ubuntu repos.
RUN  apt-get update -y && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get upgrade -y && \
apt-get install -y bpftrace bpfcc-tools python3 binutils libelf1 kmod wget \
xz-utils ca-certificates && update-ca-certificates && apt-get clean

COPY --from=gobuilder /go/src/github.com/iovisor/kubectl-trace/_output/bin/trace-runner /bin/trace-runner

ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/trace-runner"]

[fntlnz]

Thanks @jesseward would you be able to send a PR with your proposed changes?

[fntlnz]

I'm looking into this one. We need to revamp the base builder images we use for bcc and bpftrace since those tools are not uploading to quay anymore. I'm thinkin about having the dockerfiles for those in this repo directly to avoid this kind of issue in the future.

I think that once we have that, and after we update the go mod as well, we can do a new release.