An Update on Pahole

An update on pahole Pahole (originally "Poke-a-hole") is a Swiss Army knife for exploring and editing debug information. Pahole is also currently involved in the kernel's build process to rearrange the information produced by various compilers into a form useful to the BPF verifier, although there are plans to render it unnecessary. Pahole maintainer Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo shared some status updates about the project at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. Interested readers can find his slides here. Pahole has several uses in kernel development, including inspecting the layout of kernel structures, finding cache-line misalignment problems, and collecting statistics from the kernel's debugging information. The reason that Melo was presenting in the BPF track, however, is that pahole is also currently responsible for taking the debugging information generated during a build of the kernel and (if the user has enabled BPF) converting it into BTF for t ... Read full article.