On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 12:42 PM Andrii Nakryiko [off-list ref] wrote:

This patch set adds new libbpf APIs and their bpftool integration that allows
to perform static linking of BPF object files. Currently no extern resolution
across object files is performed. This is going to be the focus of the follow
up patches. But, given amount of code and logic necessary to perform just
basic functionality of linking together mostly independent BPF object files,
it was decided to land basic BPF linker code and logic first and extend it
afterwards.

The motivation for BPF static linking is to provide the functionality that is
naturally assumed for user-space development process: ability to structure
application's code without artificial restrictions of having all the code and
data (variables and maps) inside a single source code file.

This enables better engineering practices of splitting code into
well-encapsulated parts. It provides ability to hide internal state from other
parts of the code base through static variables and maps. It is also a first
steps towards having generic reusable BPF libraries.

Please see individual patches (mostly #6 and #7) for more details. Patch #10
passes all test_progs' individual BPF .o files through BPF static linker,
which is supposed to be a no-op operation, so is essentially validating that
BPF static linker doesn't produce corrupted ELF object files. Patch #11 adds
Makefile infra to be able to specify multi-file BPF object files and adds the
first multi-file test to validate correctness.

v3->v4:
  - fix Makefile copy/paste error of diff'ing invalid object files (Alexei);
  - fix uninitialized obj_name variable that could lead to bogus object names
    being used during skeleton generation (kernel-patches CI);

Applied.