fio --- fio is a tool that will spawn a number of threads or processes doing a particular type of io action as specified by the user. fio takes a number of global parameters, each inherited by the thread unless otherwise parameters given to them overriding that setting is given. The typical use of fio is to write a job file matching the io load one wants to simulate. Source ------ fio resides in a git repo, the canonical place is: git://git.kernel.dk/fio.git If you are inside a corporate firewall, git:// may not always work for you. In that case you can use the http protocol, path is the same: http://git.kernel.dk/fio.git Snapshots are frequently generated and they include the git meta data as well. You can download them here: http://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/ Binary packages --------------- Debian: Starting with Debian "Squeeze", fio packages are part of the official Debian repository. http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fio Ubuntu: Starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka "Lucid Lynx"), fio packages are part of the Ubuntu "universe" repository. http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=fio Red Hat, CentOS & Co: Dag Wieërs has RPMs for Red Hat related distros, find them here: http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/fio/ Mandriva: Mandriva has integrated fio into their package repository, so installing on that distro should be as easy as typing 'urpmi fio'. Solaris: Packages for Solaris are available from OpenCSW. Install their pkgutil tool (http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/) and then install fio via 'pkgutil -i fio'. Windows: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> has fio packages for Windows at http://www.bluestop.org/fio/ . Mailing list ------------ There's a mailing list associated with fio. It's meant for general discussion, bug reporting, questions, and development - basically anything that has to do with fio. An automated mail detailing recent commits is automatically sent to the list at most daily. The list address is fio@vger.kernel.org, subscribe by sending an email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org with subscribe fio in the body of the email. Archives can be found here: http://www.spinics.net/lists/fio/ and archives for the old list can be found here: http://maillist.kernel.dk/fio-devel/ Building -------- Just type 'configure', 'make' and 'make install'. Note that GNU make is required. On BSD it's available from devel/gmake; on Solaris it's in the SUNWgmake package. On platforms where GNU make isn't the default, type 'gmake' instead of 'make'. Configure will print the enabled options. Note that on Linux based platforms, you'll need to have the libaio development packages installed to use the libaio engine. Depending on distro, it is usually called libaio-devel or libaio-dev. For gfio, you need gtk 2.18 or newer and associated glib threads and cairo. gfio isn't built automatically, it needs to be enabled with a --enable-gfio option to configure. To build FIO with a cross-compiler: $ make clean $ make CROSS_COMPILE=/path/to/toolchain/prefix Configure will attempt to determine the target platform automatically. Windows ------- On Windows Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) is required in order to build fio. To create an MSI installer package install WiX 3.7 from http://wixtoolset.org and run dobuild.cmd from the os/windows directory. How to compile FIO on 64-bit Windows: 1. Install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe). Install 'make' and all packages starting with 'mingw64-i686' and 'mingw64-x86_64'. 2. Download ftp://sourceware.org/pub/pthreads-win32/prebuilt-dll-2-9-1-release/dll/x64/pthreadGC2.dll and copy to the fio source directory. 3. Open the Cygwin Terminal. 4. Go to the fio directory (source files). 5. Run 'make clean'. 6. Run 'make'. To build fio on 32-bit Windows, download x86/pthreadGC2.dll instead and do './configure --build-32bit-win=yes' before 'make'. It's recommended that once built or installed, fio be run in a Command Prompt or other 'native' console such as console2, since there are known to be display and signal issues when running it under a Cygwin shell (see http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=56 for details). Command line ------------ $ fio --debug Enable some debugging options (see below) --parse-only Parse options only, don't start any IO --output Write output to file --runtime Runtime in seconds --ionum Terminate after completing specified num of IOs --latency-log Generate per-job latency logs --bandwidth-log Generate per-job bandwidth logs --minimal Minimal (terse) output --output-format=type Output format (terse,json,normal) --terse-version=type Terse version output format (default 3, or 2 or 4). --version Print version info and exit --help Print this page --cpuclock-test Perform test/validation of CPU clock --cmdhelp=cmd Print command help, "all" for all of them --enghelp=engine Print ioengine help, or list available ioengines --enghelp=engine,cmd Print help for an ioengine cmd --showcmd Turn a job file into command line options --readonly Turn on safety read-only checks, preventing writes --eta=when When ETA estimate should be printed May be "always", "never" or "auto" --eta-newline=time Force a new line for every 'time' period passed --status-interval=t Force full status dump every 't' period passed --section=name Only run specified section in job file. Multiple sections can be specified. --alloc-size=kb Set smalloc pool to this size in kb (def 1024) --warnings-fatal Fio parser warnings are fatal --max-jobs Maximum number of threads/processes to support --server=args Start backend server. See Client/Server section. --client=host Connect to specified backend. --idle-prof=option Report cpu idleness on a system or percpu basis (option=system,percpu) or run unit work calibration only (option=calibrate). Any parameters following the options will be assumed to be job files, unless they match a job file parameter. You can add as many as you want, each job file will be regarded as a separate group and fio will stonewall its execution. The --readonly switch is an extra safety guard to prevent accidentally turning on a write setting when that is not desired. Fio will only write if rw=write/randwrite/rw/randrw is given, but this extra safety net can be used as an extra precaution. It will also enable a write check in the io engine core to prevent an accidental write due to a fio bug. The debug switch allows adding options that trigger certain logging options in fio. Currently the options are: process Dump info related to processes file Dump info related to file actions io Dump info related to IO queuing mem Dump info related to memory allocations blktrace Dump info related to blktrace setup verify Dump info related to IO verification all Enable all debug options random Dump info related to random offset generation parse Dump info related to option matching and parsing diskutil Dump info related to disk utilization updates job:x Dump info only related to job number x mutex Dump info only related to mutex up/down ops profile Dump info related to profile extensions time Dump info related to internal time keeping ? or help Show available debug options. You can specify as many as you want, eg --debug=file,mem will enable file and memory debugging. The section switch is meant to make it easier to ship a bigger job file instead of several smaller ones. Say you define a job file with light, moderate, and heavy parts. Then you can ask fio to run the given part only by giving it a --section=heavy command line option. The section option only applies to job sections, the reserved 'global' section is always parsed and taken into account. Fio has an internal allocator for shared memory called smalloc. It allocates shared structures from this pool. The pool defaults to 1024k in size, and can grow to 128 pools. If running large jobs with randommap enabled it can run out of memory, in which case the --alloc-size switch is handy for starting with a larger pool size. The backing store is files in /tmp. Fio cleans up after itself, while it is running you may see .fio_smalloc.* files in /tmp. Job file -------- See the HOWTO file for a more detailed description of parameters and what they mean. This file contains the terse version. You can describe big and complex setups with the command line, but generally it's a lot easier to just write a simple job file to describe the workload. The job file format is in the ini style format, as that is easy to read and write for the user. The HOWTO or man page has a full list of all options, along with descriptions, etc. The --cmdhelp option also lists all options. If used with an option argument, it will detail that particular option. Client/server ------------ Normally you would run fio as a stand-alone application on the machine where the IO workload should be generated. However, it is also possible to run the frontend and backend of fio separately. This makes it possible to have a fio server running on the machine(s) where the IO workload should be running, while controlling it from another machine. To start the server, you would do: fio --server=args on that machine, where args defines what fio listens to. The arguments are of the form 'type,hostname or IP,port'. 'type' is either 'ip' (or ip4) for TCP/IP v4, 'ip6' for TCP/IP v6, or 'sock' for a local unix domain socket. 'hostname' is either a hostname or IP address, and 'port' is the port to listen to (only valid for TCP/IP, not a local socket). Some examples: 1) fio --server Start a fio server, listening on all interfaces on the default port (8765). 2) fio --server=ip:hostname,4444 Start a fio server, listening on IP belonging to hostname and on port 4444. 3) fio --server=ip6:::1,4444 Start a fio server, listening on IPv6 localhost ::1 and on port 4444. 4) fio --server=,4444 Start a fio server, listening on all interfaces on port 4444. 5) fio --server=1.2.3.4 Start a fio server, listening on IP 1.2.3.4 on the default port. 6) fio --server=sock:/tmp/fio.sock Start a fio server, listening on the local socket /tmp/fio.sock. When a server is running, you can connect to it from a client. The client is run with: fio --local-args --client=server --remote-args <job file(s)> where --local-args are arguments that are local to the client where it is running, 'server' is the connect string, and --remote-args and <job file(s)> are sent to the server. The 'server' string follows the same format as it does on the server side, to allow IP/hostname/socket and port strings. You can connect to multiple clients as well, to do that you could run: fio --client=server2 <job file(s)> --client=server2 <job file(s)> Platforms --------- Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSX, NetBSD, Windows and FreeBSD. Some features and/or options may only be available on some of the platforms, typically because those features only apply to that platform (like the solarisaio engine, or the splice engine on Linux). Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is disk utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that does exist in FreeBSD/Solaris. Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and FreeBSD does not support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, only threads are supported on FreeBSD. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or other locking alternatives. Other *BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out of the box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms, your mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool available on all platforms. Note that POSIX aio is not enabled by default on AIX. If you get messages like: Symbol resolution failed for /usr/lib/libc.a(posix_aio.o) because: Symbol _posix_kaio_rdwr (number 2) is not exported from dependent module /unix. you need to enable POSIX aio. Run the following commands as root: # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0 posix_aio0 Defined Posix Asynchronous I/O # cfgmgr -l posix_aio0 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0 posix_aio0 Available Posix Asynchronous I/O POSIX aio should work now. To make the change permanent: # chdev -l posix_aio0 -P -a autoconfig='available' posix_aio0 changed Author ------ Fio was written by Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> to enable flexible testing of the Linux IO subsystem and schedulers. He got tired of writing specific test applications to simulate a given workload, and found that the existing io benchmark/test tools out there weren't flexible enough to do what he wanted. Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> 20060905