As you may know, BPF CO-RE is not supported by Aya from Rust code. Supporting CO-RE directly from Rust code is a consequent work as it requires modifying the rustc target to compile to bpf and this is in the pipe of Aya team. However, a work around can be made by defining so-called shim functions in C to access structures you need CO-RE support for. These functions are then linked to your eBPF binary using bpf-linker, but this is totally transparent to you. The only things you need to do are:

1. defining your shim functions in C
2. create a build.rs to compile the shim to eBPF
3. use it in Rust via extern C functions.

This repo gives you examples on how to define shim functions.

Prerequisites

1. Install a rust stable toolchain: rustup install stable
2. Install a rust nightly toolchain with the rust-src component: rustup toolchain install nightly --component rust-src
3. Install custom bpf-linker (see next section)

Install custom bpf-linker

!!!! IMPORTANT: This might not be true for ever as bpf-linker will be updated so that you don't have to do all that custom installation

Making shim working requires embedding BTF information (used for relocation) inside your eBPF program. However the way Rust generates Debugging Information used for BTF (because a part of your program is Rust) makes the Linux kernel un-happy when trying to load/relocate your program. So, to generate BTF information your kernel will be happy with, it requires both LLVM to be patched and bpf-linker to be patched to process LLVM Debugging Information in such a way your eBPF binary contains BTF information the Linux kernel can handle.

Basically, to install a bpf-linker which will work with this example and with C-shim in general, you should follow the instructions here: https://github.com/vadorovsky/aya-btf-maps-experiments. Right after you can find a set of condensed instructions to achieve the same goal.

Instructions to build custom LLVM

1. clone forked llvm: git clone https://github.com/vadorovsky/llvm-project.git
2. cd llvm-project
3. git checkout bpf-fixes
4. mkdir build && cd build
5. build llvm: CC=clang CXX=clang++ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS=1 -DLLVM_ENABLE_LLD=1 -GNinja ../llvm/

Instructions to build custom bpf-linker

!!! That process will replace your current bpf-linker so if you want to revert those changes go back to the original procedure of installing bpf-linker (i.e. cargo install bpf-linker).

1. Make sure you have built a custom LLVM
2. clone forked bpf-linker: git clone https://github.com/vadorovsky/bpf-linker.git
3. cd bpf-linker
4. git checkout fix-di
5. Install custom bpf-linker : LLVM_SYS_160_PREFIX=/path/to/llvm-project/build cargo install --path . --no-default-features --features system-llvm bpf-linker

Build eBPF

cargo xtask build-ebpf

To perform a release build you can use the --release flag. You may also change the target architecture with the --target flag.

Build Userspace

cargo build

Run

RUST_LOG=info cargo xtask run