What causes "Failed to get the system running time: " in OpenNHP/opennhp?

Check the panic text's OS error (e.g. ENOSYS, permission denied) to identify the blocked syscall.

Failed to get the system running time:

Error message

Failed to get the system running time:

What it means

The ebpf engine package's init() calls syscall.Sysinfo to read system uptime and derive the boot time (bootTime), which ebpf time-translation later depends on. If the Sysinfo syscall fails, init panics with 'Failed to get the system running time: ' + the OS error, so the whole nhp-ac process aborts at startup. Because it is a package init, this fires before main() and cannot be caught.

Solutions

Check the panic text's OS error (e.g. ENOSYS, permission denied) to identify the blocked syscall.
Adjust the sandbox/seccomp profile to allow sysinfo, or run on a standard Linux kernel.
If portability is required, replace the panic in init() with a deferred/lazy computation of bootTime (compute on first use) and log/return an error instead of crashing.
Fallback: derive boot time from /proc/stat's 'btime' field if Sysinfo is unavailable.
Report/fix upstream if the target platform genuinely lacks Sysinfo support in Go's syscall package.

Example fix

// before
func init() {
	var info syscall.Sysinfo_t
	if err := syscall.Sysinfo(&info); err != nil {
		panic("Failed to get the system running time: " + err.Error())
	}
	bootTime = now.Add(-time.Duration(info.Uptime) * time.Second)
}
// after
var initBootTimeErr error

func init() {
	var info syscall.Sysinfo_t
	if err := syscall.Sysinfo(&info); err != nil {
		initBootTimeErr = fmt.Errorf("failed to get the system running time: %w", err)
		log.Error(initBootTimeErr.Error())
		return
	}
	bootTime = time.Now().Add(-time.Duration(info.Uptime) * time.Second)
}

Defensive patterns

Strategy: fallback

Validate before calling

// Pre-flight check in deployment scripts before starting nhp-ac
if ! grep -q '^btime' /proc/stat 2>/dev/null; then
  echo 'warning: sysinfo/proc may be restricted; ebpf boot-time derivation may fail'
fi

Try / catch

// init() cannot be caught; recover at the boundary that imports the package
func safeStart() (err error) {
	defer func() {
		if r := recover(); r != nil {
			err = fmt.Errorf("ebpf engine init panicked: %v", r)
		}
	}()
	_ = ebpfegine.BootTime() // triggers package init
	return nil
}

Prevention

Deploy nhp-ac only on standard Linux kernels where sysinfo is available.
Review container seccomp profiles to ensure SYS_sysinfo is allowed.
Prefer builds where boot-time computation is lazy rather than done in package init().
Smoke-test the daemon in the target sandbox (gVisor, Firecracker, etc.) before production rollout.

When it happens

Trigger: Starting any binary that imports endpoints/ac/ebpf when syscall.Sysinfo fails — e.g. the kernel does not provide the sysinfo syscall or it is blocked by the sandbox.

Common situations: Running nhp-ac in gVisor/containers or restricted sandboxes that filter syscalls; cross-compiling to an OS/arch where syscall.Sysinfo is unsupported; seccomp profiles dropping SYS_sysinfo.

Understand the failure class

Background: "unsupported platform" / "not supported on this platform" errors: what they mean and how to fix them — this error's family across 47 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of OpenNHP/opennhp@6e04ca5ff0 (2026-09-07). Data as JSON: /api/errors/c7538f433a6a4cfc. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at endpoints/ac/ebpf/ebpfegine.go:68

type Event struct {
	Timestamp  uint64 `ebpf:"timestamp"`
	Action     uint8  `ebpf:"action"`
	SrcIP      uint32 `ebpf:"src_ip"`
	DstIP      uint32 `ebpf:"dst_ip"`
	SrcPort    uint16 `ebpf:"src_port"`
	DstPort    uint16 `ebpf:"dst_port"`
	Protocol   uint8  `ebpf:"protocol"`
	PayloadLen uint16 `ebpf:"payload_len"`
}

var xdpLink link.Link
var tcLink link.Link
var bootTime time.Time

func init() {
	var info syscall.Sysinfo_t
	if err := syscall.Sysinfo(&info); err != nil {
		panic("Failed to get the system running time: " + err.Error())
	}

	now := time.Now()
	bootTime = now.Add(-time.Duration(info.Uptime) * time.Second)
	log.Info("System boot time: %v", bootTime)
}

func EbpfEngineLoad(dirPath string, logLevel int, acId string) error {
	CleanupBPFFiles()
	if err := rlimit.RemoveMemlock(); err != nil {
		log.Error("Failed to remove memlock limit")
	}

	const ebpfenginename string = "nhp_ebpf_xdp.o"
	const tcObjName string = "tc_egress.o"
	//ebpf nhp_ebpf_xdp.o save to etc/ after clang compile
	bpfDir := "etc"
	specPath := filepath.Join(bpfDir, ebpfenginename)

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