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On Dec 22, 2020, at 3:31 PM, Linus Lüssing <linus.luess...@c0d3.blue> wrote:

> Basically we want to do live measurements of the overhead of the mesh
> routing protocol and measure and dissect the layer 2 broadcast traffic.
> To measure how much ARP, DHCP, ICMPv6 NS/NA/RS/RA, MDNS, LLDP overhead
> etc. we have.

OK, so I'm not a member of the bpf mailing list, so this message won't get to 
that list, but:

Given how general (e)BPF is in Linux, and given the number of places where you 
can add an eBPF program, and given the extensions added by the "(e)" part, it 
might be possible to:

        construct a single eBPF program that matches all of those packet types;

        provides, in some fashion, an indication of *which* of the packet types 
matched;

        provides the packet length as well.

If you *only* care about the packet counts and packet byte counts, that might 
be sufficient if the eBPF program can be put into the right place in the 
networking stack - it would also mean that the Linux kernel wouldn't have to 
copy the packets (as it does for each PF_PACKET socket being used for 
capturing, and there's one of those for every pcap_t), and your program 
wouldn't have to read those packets.

libpcap won't help you there, as it doesn't even know about eBPF, much less 
about it's added capabilities, but it sounds as if this is a Linux-specific 
program, so that doesn't matter.  There may be a compiler allowing you to write 
a program to do what's described above and get it compiled into eBPF.

I don't know whether there's a place in the networking stack to which you can 
attach an eBPF probe to do this, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that 
there is one.

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