Oct 25, 2023, this is the day I pushed the first commit to my silly little eBPF project, sberf. You can tell I stole this name from a prestigious performance analysis tool, perf.

I didn't just steal the name, I stole some code from perf as well, about how to parse subcommands, calling function pointers and stuff.

I wouldn't believe you if you told me that I can contribute to perf myself, I'd say you are crazy. I remember the day when I first read perf record's code, all I saw was evlist this, evlist that, and no matter what, I just couldn't understand these abstractions, I was discouraged.

Well actually, anybody can contribute to perf, here's a blog post I wrote about how to do it.

Fast forward to the GSoC application period, I started writing a proposal. I have a low expectation of getting selected, and that expectation dropped to none after reading this proposal in the mailing list: Proposal for Roofline Support in perf. Figured that getting selected doesn't matter that much, contributing to a project that I looked up to is cool enough, so I started working.

At first I thought kernel people are a little weird. No github, no GUI version controls, just plain texts, CLI tools and emails. I read some posts about how to contribute to the kernel, and I started to practice it. Luckily there's no learning curve in text editors for C, for I have used vim + tmux for years.

I cured my evlistphobia by taking 3000+ lines of notes on perf record's codebase, and I sent a patch series on off-cpu feature (where I also copied a lot of code from arnaldo carvalho de melo's perf trace). And then luckily, I got selected and I'm now contributing to perf.

About a month later, I contribute a feature: enum pretty printing for perf trace, this paves the path for the struct pointer pretty-printing feature, which I have been working on as a background task.

Thank you, that's my story, and thank you, perf.

Because I'm writing C instead of Java, there's only one more thing that I want to do. That is... turning off syntax highlighting.

Haha, it's just a joke. Or is it?