Requirements

Kernel Requirements (per gadget)

Inspektor Gadget uses eBPF to obtain the insights it provides. The different gadgets provided use different eBPF capabilities. The capabilities available depend on the version of the kernel running in the node, as well as whether or not the kernel has BTF enabled (via CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF=y).

The gadgets implementation relies on Compile Once - Run Everywhere (CO-RE) approach. These tools need to have BTF information. This information is collected from three different sources, a fallback mechanism is implemented to try another source if the previous one was not available.

The kernel already exposes it through /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux: the kernel was compiled with CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF).
It’s available in the gadget container image: we ship the BTF information for some well known kernel versions using BTFGen .
It’s downloaded from BTFHub .

In case your kernel does not support CO-RE, we advise you to use an older version of Inspektor Gadget which provides BCC gadget like v0.21.0-bcc

Required Kernel Versions and `CONFIG_*`

This section summarizes the kernel versions and features that are required to run the gadgets. This has been generated by testing different Ubuntu versions and their shipped kernels, hence it’s possible that some gadgets work in older kernels than the one mentioned here.

All gadgets require the following:

CONFIG_BPF=y
CONFIG_BPF_SYSCALL=y.
CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF=y if the host kernel is not supported by BTFHub.

For all gadgets, the minimum kernel version and additional needed CONFIG_* are listed in the following table:

Gadget	Minimum Kernel	Additional `CONFIG_*`
`advise network-policy`	U.U
`advise seccomp-profile`	U.U
`audit seccomp`	5.4	`KPROBES`
`profile block-io`	U.U
`profile cpu`	U.U
`profile tcprtt`	U.U	`KPROBES`
`snapshot process`	5.10
`snapshot socket`	5.10
`top block-io`	U.U	`KPROBES`
`top file`	5.4	`KPROBES`
`top tcp`	U.U	`KPROBES`
`trace bind`	5.4	`KPROBES`, `KRETPROBES`
`trace capabilities`	U.U	`KPROBES`
`trace dns`	5.4
`trace exec`	5.4	`FTRACE_SYSCALLS`
`trace fsslower`	5.4	`KPROBES`, `KRETPROBES`
`trace mount`	U.U	`FTRACE_SYSCALLS`
`trace oomkill`	5.4	`KPROBES`
`trace open`	5.4	`FTRACE_SYSCALLS`
`trace signal`	5.4	`FTRACE_SYSCALLS`
`trace sni`	U.U
`trace tcp`	U.U
`trace tcpconnect`	5.8	`KPROBES`, `KRETPROBES`
`trace tcpdrop`	5.17
`trace tcpretrans`	4.15
`script`	4.9
`traceloop`	4.15	`KPROBES`

If the kernel version is U.U, it means we do not have this information at the moment.

Kubernetes Platform Requirements

Kubernetes platforms	Support
Minikube	✔️
AKS, EKS, GKS	✔️
AWS Fargate, Azure Containers instances, GKE Autopilot	❌ (see #1320 )
OpenShift	✔️
Talos	✔️

Container Runtime Requirements

Orchestrator	Container manager	Container runtime	Support
docker	containerd	runc	✔️
nerdctl	containerd	runc	✔️
Kubernetes	containerd	runc	✔️
Kubernetes	containerd	wasm	❌ (see #1899 )
Kubernetes	containerd	katacontainers	❌
Kubernetes	CRI-O	runc / crun	Kubernetes v1.20+ (see below )
Podman (root)	podman	runc / crun	✔️
Podman (rootless)	podman	runc / crun	Only with Podman API enabled (see below )

CRI-O

We only support CRI v1 meaning that only CRI-O v1.20+ (compatible with Kubernetes v1.20+) is supported.

Podman (rootless)

We use Podman API to trace containers. In case we want trace rootless containers, we need to ensure that the Podman API is available via socket as:

$ systemctl start --user podman.socket
# use rootless Podman API socket i.e /run/user/USERID#/podman/podman.sock
$ sudo ig -r podman --podman-socketpath /run/user/$UID/podman/podman.sock list-containers
$ sudo ig -r podman --podman-socketpath /run/user/$UID/podman/podman.sock snapshot process