Author here. `profile-bee` is an eBPF profiler that ships as a single cargo install binary, which can be convenient without BCC, libbpf or perf dependencies. This is made possible building on some really cool libraries aya-rs (ebpf framework), blazesym (symbolization), flamelens (flamegraph tui), inferno (flamegraphs).

There are numerous tools and approaches to profiling, but few things interesting I thought worth mentioning here

\- ebpf/kernel based stack counting - to reduce performance impact on running applications, this have been mentioned often in Branden Gregg's blog

\- dwarf stack unwinding in eBPF - useful when applications builds omits frame-pointers. because dwarf stack unwinding isn't supported in bpf/the kernel, this portion was more complex, which took me a good amount of time just reading literature on the net (helpful that there's a couple of blog post from others building continuous ebpf profilers) and had really good assistance from genAI/LLMs. 

\- stacktraces/flamegraphs for uprobes - this opens up the possibility of targeted profiling, and inspired by GDB is able to do wildcard matches on function/library names. kprobes and tracepoints are also supported

\- interactive TUI - one of the biggest pain points with profiling+flamegraphs workflows is that they're multi-steps (first profile, then process, convert, generate flamegraphs).  profile-bee embeds a live flamegraph in the terminal so you get immediate feedback

\- multiple output format - without the tui, profile-bee still give you the option to generate svg, stackcollapse, json/html exports or a web based streaming interface

  
This could considered be early preview (since I'm still finding issues by myself) but it gotten to a point I think is usable and made my initial release to crates.io. Among other limitations are

\- native code (C, C++, Rust) mostly, no symbols for interpreted languages (js, java, perl, python etc)

\- dwarf unwinding is x86 only (and also just more expensive than frame-pointers)

Would appreciate folks giving this a go and looking forward to feedback 

profile-bee: single-binary eBPF CPU profiler in Rust with DWARF unwinding, TUI flamegraphs, and smart uprobe targeting