Linux eBPF installation guide

This guide provides an overview of the installation of libbpf and bpftool, whiwh are tools for eBPF. We also need clang/llvm to compile eBPF code.

Installing dependencies for bpftool

First of all, make sure your system is already updated with the following command:

sudo apt-get update -y

Now, we have to install some packages needed by bpftool. We need libelf-dev, zlib, libbfd-dev, libcap-dev, libbpf-dev and llvm package.

sudo apt-get install -y zlib1g-dev libelf-dev libbfd-dev libcap-dev libbpf-dev llvm

On Ubuntu distributions, clang is basically installed but if it's not, you can install it with

sudo apt install clang

Now, you can install bpftool without any stress. You just have to clone the bpftool repository, compile, and install it with :

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/libbpf/bpftool.git
cd bpftool/src
sudo make install

Your installation should be complete, and you can now compile BPF code.

If you try to execute your code, you will see this issue :

sudo ./simple
./simple: error while loading shared libraries: libbpf.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

If this issue occurs, you just need to tell the opearting system where it can locate it at runtime.

To do so, we will need to execute those command:

sudo find / -name libbpf.so.1

To find where the library is placed if you dont know it

sudo ldconfig my_path

Where my_path is the path for the file libbpf.so.1

With that if you try to execute your code, it will work. Otherwise, you can look at this forum to see if your problem is resolved : - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/480764/linux-error-while-loading-shared-libraries-cannot-open-shared-object-file-no-s

Congratulation, now you can make and execute instructions and code to use eBPF technology.