#5510·bcc

Adding 'netstacklat' as a new libbpf-tools utility?

Author: tohojoCreated May 8, 2026Updated Jul 15, 2026

Hello folks

We have developed the netstacklat utility over in the bpf-examples repository, and this has now progressed to a state where it is useful out of the box. So we are now looking for a home for it, and are wondering whether it would be appropriate as a new addition to the libbpf-tools distributed as part of BCC?

Netstacklat can show the latency of packets traversing the kernel networking stack, by attaching small BPF probes to different places in the stack, and relying on software timestamping to collect aggregate packet latency statistics at each point. As such, it falls into the same category as some of the other standalone utilities in this repository.

There's a longer explanation of the utility over on the Red Hat developer's blog.

We are aware that some adjustments would need to be made before opening a PR (such as writing a man page), but wanted to gauge interest here before undertaking that work.

So, my question is simply, do you think netstacklat would be an appropriate addition to the libbpf-tools, and would a PR adding it be welcome?

Thanks!