usbtop-ebpf

A top-like tool for monitoring USB traffic using eBPF, inspired by usbtop.

Unlike usbtop, which captures packets from usbmon and performs bus traffic calculations on URBs at the userspace level, this program uses an eBPF kprobe to collect USB traffic stats directly from URBs in the kernel.

Example output

Below is an example of the output from usbtop.py, showing a very fast read from a USB SSD connected to a 5 Gbps port and a much slower read from an RTL-SDR dongle.

Bus 6:
  Device   6.12  [0bda:9210]:
    0x81 (BULK, IN ):       3.38 Gbps    402.55 MiB/s
    0x83 (BULK, IN ):     104.88 Kbps     12.80 KiB/s
    0x04 (BULK, OUT):     209.77 Kbps     25.61 KiB/s
Bus 9:
  Device   9.30  [0bda:2838]:
    0x81 (BULK, IN ):       4.19 Mbps    512.00 KiB/s

Quick start

Software dependencies

• Python 3
• bcc and its Python bindings

• On Arch Linux, run sudo pacman -S python-bcc.

• On Debian, run sudo apt-get install python3-bpfcc

Procedure

• Install dependencies.
• Run sudo ./usbtop.py.

License

Except where stated otherwise, the contents of this repository are made available under the Zero-Clause BSD (0BSD) license.