cilium/pwru

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3813 stars · 227 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

pwru is an eBPF-based CLI tool for tracing network packets through the Linux kernel with fine-grained filtering. It helps debug connectivity issues by showing where packets are dropped or processed inside kernel functions.

Use cases

• trace where a packet is dropped in the linux kernel
• debug network connectivity issues with ebpf
• find which iptables rule drops my packets
• trace packet flow through kernel functions
• debug kubernetes node networking packet loss
• inspect skb lifecycle in the kernel

When to choose

• you need to see exactly where packets are dropped or transformed inside the Linux kernel
• you're debugging complex networking setups like iptables, eBPF programs, or routing on Linux >= 5.3
• you want a single static binary with pcap-filter-style packet filtering

When to avoid

• you need userspace application-level packet analysis (use tcpdump or Wireshark instead)
• your kernel is older than 5.3 or lacks CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF
• you need a cross-platform tool - pwru is Linux-only

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

tracing monitoring networking developer-tools networking developer-tools operating-systems cli ebpf bpf kernel-debugging packet-tracing kprobes network-debugging debugging linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cilium/pwru")