Documentation update
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1Table of contents
2-----------------
3
41. Overview
52. How fio works
63. Running fio
74. Job file format
85. Detailed list of parameters
96. Normal output
107. Terse output
118. Trace file format
129. CPU idleness profiling
1310. Verification and triggers
1411. Log File Formats
15
16
171.0 Overview and history
18------------------------
19fio was originally written to save me the hassle of writing special test
20case programs when I wanted to test a specific workload, either for
21performance reasons or to find/reproduce a bug. The process of writing
22such a test app can be tiresome, especially if you have to do it often.
23Hence I needed a tool that would be able to simulate a given io workload
24without resorting to writing a tailored test case again and again.
25
26A test work load is difficult to define, though. There can be any number
27of processes or threads involved, and they can each be using their own
28way of generating io. You could have someone dirtying large amounts of
29memory in an memory mapped file, or maybe several threads issuing
30reads using asynchronous io. fio needed to be flexible enough to
31simulate both of these cases, and many more.
32
332.0 How fio works
34-----------------
35The first step in getting fio to simulate a desired io workload, is
36writing a job file describing that specific setup. A job file may contain
37any number of threads and/or files - the typical contents of the job file
38is a global section defining shared parameters, and one or more job
39sections describing the jobs involved. When run, fio parses this file
40and sets everything up as described. If we break down a job from top to
41bottom, it contains the following basic parameters:
42
43 IO type Defines the io pattern issued to the file(s).
44 We may only be reading sequentially from this
45 file(s), or we may be writing randomly. Or even
46 mixing reads and writes, sequentially or randomly.
47
48 Block size In how large chunks are we issuing io? This may be
49 a single value, or it may describe a range of
50 block sizes.
51
52 IO size How much data are we going to be reading/writing.
53
54 IO engine How do we issue io? We could be memory mapping the
55 file, we could be using regular read/write, we
56 could be using splice, async io, or even SG
57 (SCSI generic sg).
58
59 IO depth If the io engine is async, how large a queuing
60 depth do we want to maintain?
61
62 IO type Should we be doing buffered io, or direct/raw io?
63
64 Num files How many files are we spreading the workload over.
65
66 Num threads How many threads or processes should we spread
67 this workload over.
68
69The above are the basic parameters defined for a workload, in addition
70there's a multitude of parameters that modify other aspects of how this
71job behaves.
72
73
743.0 Running fio
75---------------
76See the README file for command line parameters, there are only a few
77of them.
78
79Running fio is normally the easiest part - you just give it the job file
80(or job files) as parameters:
81
82$ fio job_file
83
84and it will start doing what the job_file tells it to do. You can give
85more than one job file on the command line, fio will serialize the running
86of those files. Internally that is the same as using the 'stonewall'
87parameter described in the parameter section.
88
89If the job file contains only one job, you may as well just give the
90parameters on the command line. The command line parameters are identical
91to the job parameters, with a few extra that control global parameters
92(see README). For example, for the job file parameter iodepth=2, the
93mirror command line option would be --iodepth 2 or --iodepth=2. You can
94also use the command line for giving more than one job entry. For each
95--name option that fio sees, it will start a new job with that name.
96Command line entries following a --name entry will apply to that job,
97until there are no more entries or a new --name entry is seen. This is
98similar to the job file options, where each option applies to the current
99job until a new [] job entry is seen.
100
101fio does not need to run as root, except if the files or devices specified
102in the job section requires that. Some other options may also be restricted,
103such as memory locking, io scheduler switching, and decreasing the nice value.
104
105
1064.0 Job file format
107-------------------
108As previously described, fio accepts one or more job files describing
109what it is supposed to do. The job file format is the classic ini file,
110where the names enclosed in [] brackets define the job name. You are free
111to use any ascii name you want, except 'global' which has special meaning.
112A global section sets defaults for the jobs described in that file. A job
113may override a global section parameter, and a job file may even have
114several global sections if so desired. A job is only affected by a global
115section residing above it. If the first character in a line is a ';' or a
116'#', the entire line is discarded as a comment.
117
118So let's look at a really simple job file that defines two processes, each
119randomly reading from a 128MB file.
120
121; -- start job file --
122[global]
123rw=randread
124size=128m
125
126[job1]
127
128[job2]
129
130; -- end job file --
131
132As you can see, the job file sections themselves are empty as all the
133described parameters are shared. As no filename= option is given, fio
134makes up a filename for each of the jobs as it sees fit. On the command
135line, this job would look as follows:
136
137$ fio --name=global --rw=randread --size=128m --name=job1 --name=job2
138
139
140Let's look at an example that has a number of processes writing randomly
141to files.
142
143; -- start job file --
144[random-writers]
145ioengine=libaio
146iodepth=4
147rw=randwrite
148bs=32k
149direct=0
150size=64m
151numjobs=4
152
153; -- end job file --
154
155Here we have no global section, as we only have one job defined anyway.
156We want to use async io here, with a depth of 4 for each file. We also
157increased the buffer size used to 32KB and define numjobs to 4 to
158fork 4 identical jobs. The result is 4 processes each randomly writing
159to their own 64MB file. Instead of using the above job file, you could
160have given the parameters on the command line. For this case, you would
161specify:
162
163$ fio --name=random-writers --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=4 --rw=randwrite --bs=32k --direct=0 --size=64m --numjobs=4
164
165When fio is utilized as a basis of any reasonably large test suite, it might be
166desirable to share a set of standardized settings across multiple job files.
167Instead of copy/pasting such settings, any section may pull in an external
168.fio file with 'include filename' directive, as in the following example:
169
170; -- start job file including.fio --
171[global]
172filename=/tmp/test
173filesize=1m
174include glob-include.fio
175
176[test]
177rw=randread
178bs=4k
179time_based=1
180runtime=10
181include test-include.fio
182; -- end job file including.fio --
183
184; -- start job file glob-include.fio --
185thread=1
186group_reporting=1
187; -- end job file glob-include.fio --
188
189; -- start job file test-include.fio --
190ioengine=libaio
191iodepth=4
192; -- end job file test-include.fio --
193
194Settings pulled into a section apply to that section only (except global
195section). Include directives may be nested in that any included file may
196contain further include directive(s). Include files may not contain []
197sections.
198
199
2004.1 Environment variables
201-------------------------
202
203fio also supports environment variable expansion in job files. Any
204sub-string of the form "${VARNAME}" as part of an option value (in other
205words, on the right of the `='), will be expanded to the value of the
206environment variable called VARNAME. If no such environment variable
207is defined, or VARNAME is the empty string, the empty string will be
208substituted.
209
210As an example, let's look at a sample fio invocation and job file:
211
212$ SIZE=64m NUMJOBS=4 fio jobfile.fio
213
214; -- start job file --
215[random-writers]
216rw=randwrite
217size=${SIZE}
218numjobs=${NUMJOBS}
219; -- end job file --
220
221This will expand to the following equivalent job file at runtime:
222
223; -- start job file --
224[random-writers]
225rw=randwrite
226size=64m
227numjobs=4
228; -- end job file --
229
230fio ships with a few example job files, you can also look there for
231inspiration.
232
2334.2 Reserved keywords
234---------------------
235
236Additionally, fio has a set of reserved keywords that will be replaced
237internally with the appropriate value. Those keywords are:
238
239$pagesize The architecture page size of the running system
240$mb_memory Megabytes of total memory in the system
241$ncpus Number of online available CPUs
242
243These can be used on the command line or in the job file, and will be
244automatically substituted with the current system values when the job
245is run. Simple math is also supported on these keywords, so you can
246perform actions like:
247
248size=8*$mb_memory
249
250and get that properly expanded to 8 times the size of memory in the
251machine.
252
253
2545.0 Detailed list of parameters
255-------------------------------
256
257This section describes in details each parameter associated with a job.
258Some parameters take an option of a given type, such as an integer or
259a string. Anywhere a numeric value is required, an arithmetic expression
260may be used, provided it is surrounded by parentheses. Supported operators
261are:
262
263 addition (+)
264 subtraction (-)
265 multiplication (*)
266 division (/)
267 modulus (%)
268 exponentiation (^)
269
270For time values in expressions, units are microseconds by default. This is
271different than for time values not in expressions (not enclosed in
272parentheses). The following types are used:
273
274str String. This is a sequence of alpha characters.
275time Integer with possible time suffix. In seconds unless otherwise
276 specified, use eg 10m for 10 minutes. Accepts s/m/h for seconds,
277 minutes, and hours, and accepts 'ms' (or 'msec') for milliseconds,
278 and 'us' (or 'usec') for microseconds.
279int SI integer. A whole number value, which may contain a suffix
280 describing the base of the number. Accepted suffixes are k/m/g/t/p,
281 meaning kilo, mega, giga, tera, and peta. The suffix is not case
282 sensitive, and you may also include trailing 'b' (eg 'kb' is the same
283 as 'k'). So if you want to specify 4096, you could either write
284 out '4096' or just give 4k. The suffixes signify base 2 values, so
285 1024 is 1k and 1024k is 1m and so on, unless the suffix is explicitly
286 set to a base 10 value using 'kib', 'mib', 'gib', etc. If that is the
287 case, then 1000 is used as the multiplier. This can be handy for
288 disks, since manufacturers generally use base 10 values when listing
289 the capacity of a drive. If the option accepts an upper and lower
290 range, use a colon ':' or minus '-' to separate such values. May also
291 include a prefix to indicate numbers base. If 0x is used, the number
292 is assumed to be hexadecimal. See irange.
293bool Boolean. Usually parsed as an integer, however only defined for
294 true and false (1 and 0).
295irange Integer range with suffix. Allows value range to be given, such
296 as 1024-4096. A colon may also be used as the separator, eg
297 1k:4k. If the option allows two sets of ranges, they can be
298 specified with a ',' or '/' delimiter: 1k-4k/8k-32k. Also see
299 int.
300float_list A list of floating numbers, separated by a ':' character.
301
302With the above in mind, here follows the complete list of fio job
303parameters.
304
305name=str ASCII name of the job. This may be used to override the
306 name printed by fio for this job. Otherwise the job
307 name is used. On the command line this parameter has the
308 special purpose of also signaling the start of a new
309 job.
310
311wait_for=str Specifies the name of the already defined job to wait
312 for. Single waitee name only may be specified. If set, the job
313 won't be started until all workers of the waitee job are done.
314
315 Wait_for operates on the job name basis, so there are a few
316 limitations. First, the waitee must be defined prior to the
317 waiter job (meaning no forward references). Second, if a job
318 is being referenced as a waitee, it must have a unique name
319 (no duplicate waitees).
320
321description=str Text description of the job. Doesn't do anything except
322 dump this text description when this job is run. It's
323 not parsed.
324
325directory=str Prefix filenames with this directory. Used to place files
326 in a different location than "./". See the 'filename' option
327 for escaping certain characters.
328
329filename=str Fio normally makes up a filename based on the job name,
330 thread number, and file number. If you want to share
331 files between threads in a job or several jobs, specify
332 a filename for each of them to override the default. If
333 the ioengine used is 'net', the filename is the host, port,
334 and protocol to use in the format of =host,port,protocol.
335 See ioengine=net for more. If the ioengine is file based, you
336 can specify a number of files by separating the names with a
337 ':' colon. So if you wanted a job to open /dev/sda and /dev/sdb
338 as the two working files, you would use
339 filename=/dev/sda:/dev/sdb. On Windows, disk devices are
340 accessed as \\.\PhysicalDrive0 for the first device,
341 \\.\PhysicalDrive1 for the second etc. Note: Windows and
342 FreeBSD prevent write access to areas of the disk containing
343 in-use data (e.g. filesystems).
344 If the wanted filename does need to include a colon, then
345 escape that with a '\' character. For instance, if the filename
346 is "/dev/dsk/foo@3,0:c", then you would use
347 filename="/dev/dsk/foo@3,0\:c". '-' is a reserved name, meaning
348 stdin or stdout. Which of the two depends on the read/write
349 direction set.
350
351filename_format=str
352 If sharing multiple files between jobs, it is usually necessary
353 to have fio generate the exact names that you want. By default,
354 fio will name a file based on the default file format
355 specification of jobname.jobnumber.filenumber. With this
356 option, that can be customized. Fio will recognize and replace
357 the following keywords in this string:
358
359 $jobname
360 The name of the worker thread or process.
361
362 $jobnum
363 The incremental number of the worker thread or
364 process.
365
366 $filenum
367 The incremental number of the file for that worker
368 thread or process.
369
370 To have dependent jobs share a set of files, this option can
371 be set to have fio generate filenames that are shared between
372 the two. For instance, if testfiles.$filenum is specified,
373 file number 4 for any job will be named testfiles.4. The
374 default of $jobname.$jobnum.$filenum will be used if
375 no other format specifier is given.
376
377unique_filename=bool To avoid collisions between networked clients, fio
378 defaults to prefixing any generated filenames (with a directory
379 specified) with the source of the client connecting. To disable
380 this behavior, set this option to 0.
381
382opendir=str Tell fio to recursively add any file it can find in this
383 directory and down the file system tree.
384
385lockfile=str Fio defaults to not locking any files before it does
386 IO to them. If a file or file descriptor is shared, fio
387 can serialize IO to that file to make the end result
388 consistent. This is usual for emulating real workloads that
389 share files. The lock modes are:
390
391 none No locking. The default.
392 exclusive Only one thread/process may do IO,
393 excluding all others.
394 readwrite Read-write locking on the file. Many
395 readers may access the file at the
396 same time, but writes get exclusive
397 access.
398
399readwrite=str
400rw=str Type of io pattern. Accepted values are:
401
402 read Sequential reads
403 write Sequential writes
404 randwrite Random writes
405 randread Random reads
406 rw,readwrite Sequential mixed reads and writes
407 randrw Random mixed reads and writes
408 trimwrite Mixed trims and writes. Blocks will be
409 trimmed first, then written to.
410
411 For the mixed io types, the default is to split them 50/50.
412 For certain types of io the result may still be skewed a bit,
413 since the speed may be different. It is possible to specify
414 a number of IO's to do before getting a new offset, this is
415 done by appending a ':<nr>' to the end of the string given.
416 For a random read, it would look like 'rw=randread:8' for
417 passing in an offset modifier with a value of 8. If the
418 suffix is used with a sequential IO pattern, then the value
419 specified will be added to the generated offset for each IO.
420 For instance, using rw=write:4k will skip 4k for every
421 write. It turns sequential IO into sequential IO with holes.
422 See the 'rw_sequencer' option.
423
424rw_sequencer=str If an offset modifier is given by appending a number to
425 the rw=<str> line, then this option controls how that
426 number modifies the IO offset being generated. Accepted
427 values are:
428
429 sequential Generate sequential offset
430 identical Generate the same offset
431
432 'sequential' is only useful for random IO, where fio would
433 normally generate a new random offset for every IO. If you
434 append eg 8 to randread, you would get a new random offset for
435 every 8 IO's. The result would be a seek for only every 8
436 IO's, instead of for every IO. Use rw=randread:8 to specify
437 that. As sequential IO is already sequential, setting
438 'sequential' for that would not result in any differences.
439 'identical' behaves in a similar fashion, except it sends
440 the same offset 8 number of times before generating a new
441 offset.
442
443kb_base=int The base unit for a kilobyte. The defacto base is 2^10, 1024.
444 Storage manufacturers like to use 10^3 or 1000 as a base
445 ten unit instead, for obvious reasons. Allow values are
446 1024 or 1000, with 1024 being the default.
447
448unified_rw_reporting=bool Fio normally reports statistics on a per
449 data direction basis, meaning that read, write, and trim are
450 accounted and reported separately. If this option is set,
451 the fio will sum the results and report them as "mixed"
452 instead.
453
454randrepeat=bool For random IO workloads, seed the generator in a predictable
455 way so that results are repeatable across repetitions.
456 Defaults to true.
457
458randseed=int Seed the random number generators based on this seed value, to
459 be able to control what sequence of output is being generated.
460 If not set, the random sequence depends on the randrepeat
461 setting.
462
463fallocate=str Whether pre-allocation is performed when laying down files.
464 Accepted values are:
465
466 none Do not pre-allocate space
467 posix Pre-allocate via posix_fallocate()
468 keep Pre-allocate via fallocate() with
469 FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE set
470 0 Backward-compatible alias for 'none'
471 1 Backward-compatible alias for 'posix'
472
473 May not be available on all supported platforms. 'keep' is only
474 available on Linux.If using ZFS on Solaris this must be set to
475 'none' because ZFS doesn't support it. Default: 'posix'.
476
477fadvise_hint=bool By default, fio will use fadvise() to advise the kernel
478 on what IO patterns it is likely to issue. Sometimes you
479 want to test specific IO patterns without telling the
480 kernel about it, in which case you can disable this option.
481 If set, fio will use POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL for sequential
482 IO and POSIX_FADV_RANDOM for random IO.
483
484fadvise_stream=int Notify the kernel what write stream ID to place these
485 writes under. Only supported on Linux. Note, this option
486 may change going forward.
487
488size=int The total size of file io for this job. Fio will run until
489 this many bytes has been transferred, unless runtime is
490 limited by other options (such as 'runtime', for instance,
491 or increased/decreased by 'io_size'). Unless specific nrfiles
492 and filesize options are given, fio will divide this size
493 between the available files specified by the job. If not set,
494 fio will use the full size of the given files or devices.
495 If the files do not exist, size must be given. It is also
496 possible to give size as a percentage between 1 and 100. If
497 size=20% is given, fio will use 20% of the full size of the
498 given files or devices.
499
500io_size=int
501io_limit=int Normally fio operates within the region set by 'size', which
502 means that the 'size' option sets both the region and size of
503 IO to be performed. Sometimes that is not what you want. With
504 this option, it is possible to define just the amount of IO
505 that fio should do. For instance, if 'size' is set to 20G and
506 'io_size' is set to 5G, fio will perform IO within the first
507 20G but exit when 5G have been done. The opposite is also
508 possible - if 'size' is set to 20G, and 'io_size' is set to
509 40G, then fio will do 40G of IO within the 0..20G region.
510
511filesize=int Individual file sizes. May be a range, in which case fio
512 will select sizes for files at random within the given range
513 and limited to 'size' in total (if that is given). If not
514 given, each created file is the same size.
515
516file_append=bool Perform IO after the end of the file. Normally fio will
517 operate within the size of a file. If this option is set, then
518 fio will append to the file instead. This has identical
519 behavior to setting offset to the size of a file. This option
520 is ignored on non-regular files.
521
522fill_device=bool
523fill_fs=bool Sets size to something really large and waits for ENOSPC (no
524 space left on device) as the terminating condition. Only makes
525 sense with sequential write. For a read workload, the mount
526 point will be filled first then IO started on the result. This
527 option doesn't make sense if operating on a raw device node,
528 since the size of that is already known by the file system.
529 Additionally, writing beyond end-of-device will not return
530 ENOSPC there.
531
532blocksize=int
533bs=int The block size used for the io units. Defaults to 4k. Values
534 can be given for both read and writes. If a single int is
535 given, it will apply to both. If a second int is specified
536 after a comma, it will apply to writes only. In other words,
537 the format is either bs=read_and_write or bs=read,write,trim.
538 bs=4k,8k will thus use 4k blocks for reads, 8k blocks for
539 writes, and 8k for trims. You can terminate the list with
540 a trailing comma. bs=4k,8k, would use the default value for
541 trims.. If you only wish to set the write size, you
542 can do so by passing an empty read size - bs=,8k will set
543 8k for writes and leave the read default value.
544
545blockalign=int
546ba=int At what boundary to align random IO offsets. Defaults to
547 the same as 'blocksize' the minimum blocksize given.
548 Minimum alignment is typically 512b for using direct IO,
549 though it usually depends on the hardware block size. This
550 option is mutually exclusive with using a random map for
551 files, so it will turn off that option.
552
553blocksize_range=irange
554bsrange=irange Instead of giving a single block size, specify a range
555 and fio will mix the issued io block sizes. The issued
556 io unit will always be a multiple of the minimum value
557 given (also see bs_unaligned). Applies to both reads and
558 writes, however a second range can be given after a comma.
559 See bs=.
560
561bssplit=str Sometimes you want even finer grained control of the
562 block sizes issued, not just an even split between them.
563 This option allows you to weight various block sizes,
564 so that you are able to define a specific amount of
565 block sizes issued. The format for this option is:
566
567 bssplit=blocksize/percentage:blocksize/percentage
568
569 for as many block sizes as needed. So if you want to define
570 a workload that has 50% 64k blocks, 10% 4k blocks, and
571 40% 32k blocks, you would write:
572
573 bssplit=4k/10:64k/50:32k/40
574
575 Ordering does not matter. If the percentage is left blank,
576 fio will fill in the remaining values evenly. So a bssplit
577 option like this one:
578
579 bssplit=4k/50:1k/:32k/
580
581 would have 50% 4k ios, and 25% 1k and 32k ios. The percentages
582 always add up to 100, if bssplit is given a range that adds
583 up to more, it will error out.
584
585 bssplit also supports giving separate splits to reads and
586 writes. The format is identical to what bs= accepts. You
587 have to separate the read and write parts with a comma. So
588 if you want a workload that has 50% 2k reads and 50% 4k reads,
589 while having 90% 4k writes and 10% 8k writes, you would
590 specify:
591
592 bssplit=2k/50:4k/50,4k/90:8k/10
593
594blocksize_unaligned
595bs_unaligned If this option is given, any byte size value within bsrange
596 may be used as a block range. This typically wont work with
597 direct IO, as that normally requires sector alignment.
598
599bs_is_seq_rand If this option is set, fio will use the normal read,write
600 blocksize settings as sequential,random instead. Any random
601 read or write will use the WRITE blocksize settings, and any
602 sequential read or write will use the READ blocksize setting.
603
604zero_buffers If this option is given, fio will init the IO buffers to
605 all zeroes. The default is to fill them with random data.
606
607refill_buffers If this option is given, fio will refill the IO buffers
608 on every submit. The default is to only fill it at init
609 time and reuse that data. Only makes sense if zero_buffers
610 isn't specified, naturally. If data verification is enabled,
611 refill_buffers is also automatically enabled.
612
613scramble_buffers=bool If refill_buffers is too costly and the target is
614 using data deduplication, then setting this option will
615 slightly modify the IO buffer contents to defeat normal
616 de-dupe attempts. This is not enough to defeat more clever
617 block compression attempts, but it will stop naive dedupe of
618 blocks. Default: true.
619
620buffer_compress_percentage=int If this is set, then fio will attempt to
621 provide IO buffer content (on WRITEs) that compress to
622 the specified level. Fio does this by providing a mix of
623 random data and a fixed pattern. The fixed pattern is either
624 zeroes, or the pattern specified by buffer_pattern. If the
625 pattern option is used, it might skew the compression ratio
626 slightly. Note that this is per block size unit, for file/disk
627 wide compression level that matches this setting, you'll also
628 want to set refill_buffers.
629
630buffer_compress_chunk=int See buffer_compress_percentage. This
631 setting allows fio to manage how big the ranges of random
632 data and zeroed data is. Without this set, fio will
633 provide buffer_compress_percentage of blocksize random
634 data, followed by the remaining zeroed. With this set
635 to some chunk size smaller than the block size, fio can
636 alternate random and zeroed data throughout the IO
637 buffer.
638
639buffer_pattern=str If set, fio will fill the io buffers with this
640 pattern. If not set, the contents of io buffers is defined by
641 the other options related to buffer contents. The setting can
642 be any pattern of bytes, and can be prefixed with 0x for hex
643 values. It may also be a string, where the string must then
644 be wrapped with "", e.g.:
645
646 buffer_pattern="abcd"
647 or
648 buffer_pattern=-12
649 or
650 buffer_pattern=0xdeadface
651
652 Also you can combine everything together in any order:
653 buffer_pattern=0xdeadface"abcd"-12
654
655dedupe_percentage=int If set, fio will generate this percentage of
656 identical buffers when writing. These buffers will be
657 naturally dedupable. The contents of the buffers depend on
658 what other buffer compression settings have been set. It's
659 possible to have the individual buffers either fully
660 compressible, or not at all. This option only controls the
661 distribution of unique buffers.
662
663nrfiles=int Number of files to use for this job. Defaults to 1.
664
665openfiles=int Number of files to keep open at the same time. Defaults to
666 the same as nrfiles, can be set smaller to limit the number
667 simultaneous opens.
668
669file_service_type=str Defines how fio decides which file from a job to
670 service next. The following types are defined:
671
672 random Just choose a file at random.
673
674 roundrobin Round robin over open files. This
675 is the default.
676
677 sequential Finish one file before moving on to
678 the next. Multiple files can still be
679 open depending on 'openfiles'.
680
681 zipf Use a zipfian distribution to decide what file
682 to access.
683
684 pareto Use a pareto distribution to decide what file
685 to access.
686
687 gauss Use a gaussian (normal) distribution to decide
688 what file to access.
689
690 For random, roundrobin, and sequential, a postfix can be
691 appended to tell fio how many I/Os to issue before switching
692 to a new file. For example, specifying
693 'file_service_type=random:8' would cause fio to issue 8 I/Os
694 before selecting a new file at random. For the non-uniform
695 distributions, a floating point postfix can be given to
696 influence how the distribution is skewed. See
697 'random_distribution' for a description of how that would work.
698
699ioengine=str Defines how the job issues io to the file. The following
700 types are defined:
701
702 sync Basic read(2) or write(2) io. lseek(2) is
703 used to position the io location.
704
705 psync Basic pread(2) or pwrite(2) io.
706
707 vsync Basic readv(2) or writev(2) IO.
708
709 pvsync Basic preadv(2) or pwritev(2) IO.
710
711 psync2 Basic preadv2(2) or pwritev2(2) IO.
712
713 libaio Linux native asynchronous io. Note that Linux
714 may only support queued behaviour with
715 non-buffered IO (set direct=1 or buffered=0).
716 This engine defines engine specific options.
717
718 posixaio glibc posix asynchronous io.
719
720 solarisaio Solaris native asynchronous io.
721
722 windowsaio Windows native asynchronous io.
723
724 mmap File is memory mapped and data copied
725 to/from using memcpy(3).
726
727 splice splice(2) is used to transfer the data and
728 vmsplice(2) to transfer data from user
729 space to the kernel.
730
731 sg SCSI generic sg v3 io. May either be
732 synchronous using the SG_IO ioctl, or if
733 the target is an sg character device
734 we use read(2) and write(2) for asynchronous
735 io.
736
737 null Doesn't transfer any data, just pretends
738 to. This is mainly used to exercise fio
739 itself and for debugging/testing purposes.
740
741 net Transfer over the network to given host:port.
742 Depending on the protocol used, the hostname,
743 port, listen and filename options are used to
744 specify what sort of connection to make, while
745 the protocol option determines which protocol
746 will be used.
747 This engine defines engine specific options.
748
749 netsplice Like net, but uses splice/vmsplice to
750 map data and send/receive.
751 This engine defines engine specific options.
752
753 cpuio Doesn't transfer any data, but burns CPU
754 cycles according to the cpuload= and
755 cpucycle= options. Setting cpuload=85
756 will cause that job to do nothing but burn
757 85% of the CPU. In case of SMP machines,
758 use numjobs=<no_of_cpu> to get desired CPU
759 usage, as the cpuload only loads a single
760 CPU at the desired rate.
761
762 guasi The GUASI IO engine is the Generic Userspace
763 Asyncronous Syscall Interface approach
764 to async IO. See
765
766 http://www.xmailserver.org/guasi-lib.html
767
768 for more info on GUASI.
769
770 rdma The RDMA I/O engine supports both RDMA
771 memory semantics (RDMA_WRITE/RDMA_READ) and
772 channel semantics (Send/Recv) for the
773 InfiniBand, RoCE and iWARP protocols.
774
775 falloc IO engine that does regular fallocate to
776 simulate data transfer as fio ioengine.
777 DDIR_READ does fallocate(,mode = keep_size,)
778 DDIR_WRITE does fallocate(,mode = 0)
779 DDIR_TRIM does fallocate(,mode = punch_hole)
780
781 e4defrag IO engine that does regular EXT4_IOC_MOVE_EXT
782 ioctls to simulate defragment activity in
783 request to DDIR_WRITE event
784
785 rbd IO engine supporting direct access to Ceph
786 Rados Block Devices (RBD) via librbd without
787 the need to use the kernel rbd driver. This
788 ioengine defines engine specific options.
789
790 gfapi Using Glusterfs libgfapi sync interface to
791 direct access to Glusterfs volumes without
792 options.
793
794 gfapi_async Using Glusterfs libgfapi async interface
795 to direct access to Glusterfs volumes without
796 having to go through FUSE. This ioengine
797 defines engine specific options.
798
799 libhdfs Read and write through Hadoop (HDFS).
800 This engine interprets offsets a little
801 differently. In HDFS, files once created
802 cannot be modified. So random writes are not
803 possible. To imitate this, libhdfs engine
804 creates bunch of small files, and engine will
805 pick a file out of those files based on the
806 offset enerated by fio backend. Each jobs uses
807 it's own connection to HDFS.
808
809 mtd Read, write and erase an MTD character device
810 (e.g., /dev/mtd0). Discards are treated as
811 erases. Depending on the underlying device
812 type, the I/O may have to go in a certain
813 pattern, e.g., on NAND, writing sequentially
814 to erase blocks and discarding before
815 overwriting. The writetrim mode works well
816 for this constraint.
817
818 pmemblk Read and write through the NVML libpmemblk
819 interface.
820
821 external Prefix to specify loading an external
822 IO engine object file. Append the engine
823 filename, eg ioengine=external:/tmp/foo.o
824 to load ioengine foo.o in /tmp.
825
826iodepth=int This defines how many io units to keep in flight against
827 the file. The default is 1 for each file defined in this
828 job, can be overridden with a larger value for higher
829 concurrency. Note that increasing iodepth beyond 1 will not
830 affect synchronous ioengines (except for small degress when
831 verify_async is in use). Even async engines may impose OS
832 restrictions causing the desired depth not to be achieved.
833 This may happen on Linux when using libaio and not setting
834 direct=1, since buffered IO is not async on that OS. Keep an
835 eye on the IO depth distribution in the fio output to verify
836 that the achieved depth is as expected. Default: 1.
837
838iodepth_batch_submit=int
839iodepth_batch=int This defines how many pieces of IO to submit at once.
840 It defaults to 1 which means that we submit each IO
841 as soon as it is available, but can be raised to submit
842 bigger batches of IO at the time. If it is set to 0 the iodepth
843 value will be used.
844
845iodepth_batch_complete_min=int
846iodepth_batch_complete=int This defines how many pieces of IO to retrieve
847 at once. It defaults to 1 which means that we'll ask
848 for a minimum of 1 IO in the retrieval process from
849 the kernel. The IO retrieval will go on until we
850 hit the limit set by iodepth_low. If this variable is
851 set to 0, then fio will always check for completed
852 events before queuing more IO. This helps reduce
853 IO latency, at the cost of more retrieval system calls.
854
855iodepth_batch_complete_max=int This defines maximum pieces of IO to
856 retrieve at once. This variable should be used along with
857 iodepth_batch_complete_min=int variable, specifying the range
858 of min and max amount of IO which should be retrieved. By default
859 it is equal to iodepth_batch_complete_min value.
860
861 Example #1:
862
863 iodepth_batch_complete_min=1
864 iodepth_batch_complete_max=<iodepth>
865
866 which means that we will retrieve at leat 1 IO and up to the
867 whole submitted queue depth. If none of IO has been completed
868 yet, we will wait.
869
870 Example #2:
871
872 iodepth_batch_complete_min=0
873 iodepth_batch_complete_max=<iodepth>
874
875 which means that we can retrieve up to the whole submitted
876 queue depth, but if none of IO has been completed yet, we will
877 NOT wait and immediately exit the system call. In this example
878 we simply do polling.
879
880iodepth_low=int The low water mark indicating when to start filling
881 the queue again. Defaults to the same as iodepth, meaning
882 that fio will attempt to keep the queue full at all times.
883 If iodepth is set to eg 16 and iodepth_low is set to 4, then
884 after fio has filled the queue of 16 requests, it will let
885 the depth drain down to 4 before starting to fill it again.
886
887io_submit_mode=str This option controls how fio submits the IO to
888 the IO engine. The default is 'inline', which means that the
889 fio job threads submit and reap IO directly. If set to
890 'offload', the job threads will offload IO submission to a
891 dedicated pool of IO threads. This requires some coordination
892 and thus has a bit of extra overhead, especially for lower
893 queue depth IO where it can increase latencies. The benefit
894 is that fio can manage submission rates independently of
895 the device completion rates. This avoids skewed latency
896 reporting if IO gets back up on the device side (the
897 coordinated omission problem).
898
899direct=bool If value is true, use non-buffered io. This is usually
900 O_DIRECT. Note that ZFS on Solaris doesn't support direct io.
901 On Windows the synchronous ioengines don't support direct io.
902
903atomic=bool If value is true, attempt to use atomic direct IO. Atomic
904 writes are guaranteed to be stable once acknowledged by
905 the operating system. Only Linux supports O_ATOMIC right
906 now.
907
908buffered=bool If value is true, use buffered io. This is the opposite
909 of the 'direct' option. Defaults to true.
910
911offset=int Start io at the given offset in the file. The data before
912 the given offset will not be touched. This effectively
913 caps the file size at real_size - offset.
914
915offset_increment=int If this is provided, then the real offset becomes
916 offset + offset_increment * thread_number, where the thread
917 number is a counter that starts at 0 and is incremented for
918 each sub-job (i.e. when numjobs option is specified). This
919 option is useful if there are several jobs which are intended
920 to operate on a file in parallel disjoint segments, with
921 even spacing between the starting points.
922
923number_ios=int Fio will normally perform IOs until it has exhausted the size
924 of the region set by size=, or if it exhaust the allocated
925 time (or hits an error condition). With this setting, the
926 range/size can be set independently of the number of IOs to
927 perform. When fio reaches this number, it will exit normally
928 and report status. Note that this does not extend the amount
929 of IO that will be done, it will only stop fio if this
930 condition is met before other end-of-job criteria.
931
932fsync=int If writing to a file, issue a sync of the dirty data
933 for every number of blocks given. For example, if you give
934 32 as a parameter, fio will sync the file for every 32
935 writes issued. If fio is using non-buffered io, we may
936 not sync the file. The exception is the sg io engine, which
937 synchronizes the disk cache anyway.
938
939fdatasync=int Like fsync= but uses fdatasync() to only sync data and not
940 metadata blocks.
941 In FreeBSD and Windows there is no fdatasync(), this falls back
942 to using fsync()
943
944sync_file_range=str:val Use sync_file_range() for every 'val' number of
945 write operations. Fio will track range of writes that
946 have happened since the last sync_file_range() call. 'str'
947 can currently be one or more of:
948
949 wait_before SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_BEFORE
950 write SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE
951 wait_after SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_AFTER
952
953 So if you do sync_file_range=wait_before,write:8, fio would
954 use SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_BEFORE | SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE for
955 every 8 writes. Also see the sync_file_range(2) man page.
956 This option is Linux specific.
957
958overwrite=bool If true, writes to a file will always overwrite existing
959 data. If the file doesn't already exist, it will be
960 created before the write phase begins. If the file exists
961 and is large enough for the specified write phase, nothing
962 will be done.
963
964end_fsync=bool If true, fsync file contents when a write stage has completed.
965
966fsync_on_close=bool If true, fio will fsync() a dirty file on close.
967 This differs from end_fsync in that it will happen on every
968 file close, not just at the end of the job.
969
970rwmixread=int How large a percentage of the mix should be reads.
971
972rwmixwrite=int How large a percentage of the mix should be writes. If both
973 rwmixread and rwmixwrite is given and the values do not add
974 up to 100%, the latter of the two will be used to override
975 the first. This may interfere with a given rate setting,
976 if fio is asked to limit reads or writes to a certain rate.
977 If that is the case, then the distribution may be skewed.
978
979random_distribution=str:float By default, fio will use a completely uniform
980 random distribution when asked to perform random IO. Sometimes
981 it is useful to skew the distribution in specific ways,
982 ensuring that some parts of the data is more hot than others.
983 fio includes the following distribution models:
984
985 random Uniform random distribution
986 zipf Zipf distribution
987 pareto Pareto distribution
988 gauss Normal (guassian) distribution
989 zoned Zoned random distribution
990
991 When using a zipf or pareto distribution, an input value
992 is also needed to define the access pattern. For zipf, this
993 is the zipf theta. For pareto, it's the pareto power. Fio
994 includes a test program, genzipf, that can be used visualize
995 what the given input values will yield in terms of hit rates.
996 If you wanted to use zipf with a theta of 1.2, you would use
997 random_distribution=zipf:1.2 as the option. If a non-uniform
998 model is used, fio will disable use of the random map. For
999 the gauss distribution, a normal deviation is supplied as
1000 a value between 0 and 100.
1001
1002 For a zoned distribution, fio supports specifying percentages
1003 of IO access that should fall within what range of the file or
1004 device. For example, given a criteria of:
1005
1006 60% of accesses should be to the first 10%
1007 30% of accesses should be to the next 20%
1008 8% of accesses should be to to the next 30%
1009 2% of accesses should be to the next 40%
1010
1011 we can define that through zoning of the random accesses. For
1012 the above example, the user would do:
1013
1014 random_distribution=zoned:60/10:30/20:8/30:2/40
1015
1016 similarly to how bssplit works for setting ranges and
1017 percentages of block sizes. Like bssplit, it's possible to
1018 specify separate zones for reads, writes, and trims. If just
1019 one set is given, it'll apply to all of them.
1020
1021percentage_random=int For a random workload, set how big a percentage should
1022 be random. This defaults to 100%, in which case the workload
1023 is fully random. It can be set from anywhere from 0 to 100.
1024 Setting it to 0 would make the workload fully sequential. Any
1025 setting in between will result in a random mix of sequential
1026 and random IO, at the given percentages. It is possible to
1027 set different values for reads, writes, and trim. To do so,
1028 simply use a comma separated list. See blocksize.
1029
1030norandommap Normally fio will cover every block of the file when doing
1031 random IO. If this option is given, fio will just get a
1032 new random offset without looking at past io history. This
1033 means that some blocks may not be read or written, and that
1034 some blocks may be read/written more than once. If this option
1035 is used with verify= and multiple blocksizes (via bsrange=),
1036 only intact blocks are verified, i.e., partially-overwritten
1037 blocks are ignored.
1038
1039softrandommap=bool See norandommap. If fio runs with the random block map
1040 enabled and it fails to allocate the map, if this option is
1041 set it will continue without a random block map. As coverage
1042 will not be as complete as with random maps, this option is
1043 disabled by default.
1044
1045random_generator=str Fio supports the following engines for generating
1046 IO offsets for random IO:
1047
1048 tausworthe Strong 2^88 cycle random number generator
1049 lfsr Linear feedback shift register generator
1050 tausworthe64 Strong 64-bit 2^258 cycle random number
1051 generator
1052
1053 Tausworthe is a strong random number generator, but it
1054 requires tracking on the side if we want to ensure that
1055 blocks are only read or written once. LFSR guarantees
1056 that we never generate the same offset twice, and it's
1057 also less computationally expensive. It's not a true
1058 random generator, however, though for IO purposes it's
1059 typically good enough. LFSR only works with single
1060 block sizes, not with workloads that use multiple block
1061 sizes. If used with such a workload, fio may read or write
1062 some blocks multiple times. The default value is tausworthe,
1063 unless the required space exceeds 2^32 blocks. If it does,
1064 then tausworthe64 is selected automatically.
1065
1066nice=int Run the job with the given nice value. See man nice(2).
1067
1068prio=int Set the io priority value of this job. Linux limits us to
1069 a positive value between 0 and 7, with 0 being the highest.
1070 See man ionice(1).
1071
1072prioclass=int Set the io priority class. See man ionice(1).
1073
1074thinktime=int Stall the job x microseconds after an io has completed before
1075 issuing the next. May be used to simulate processing being
1076 done by an application. See thinktime_blocks and
1077 thinktime_spin.
1078
1079thinktime_spin=int
1080 Only valid if thinktime is set - pretend to spend CPU time
1081 doing something with the data received, before falling back
1082 to sleeping for the rest of the period specified by
1083 thinktime.
1084
1085thinktime_blocks=int
1086 Only valid if thinktime is set - control how many blocks
1087 to issue, before waiting 'thinktime' usecs. If not set,
1088 defaults to 1 which will make fio wait 'thinktime' usecs
1089 after every block. This effectively makes any queue depth
1090 setting redundant, since no more than 1 IO will be queued
1091 before we have to complete it and do our thinktime. In
1092 other words, this setting effectively caps the queue depth
1093 if the latter is larger.
1094
1095rate=int Cap the bandwidth used by this job. The number is in bytes/sec,
1096 the normal suffix rules apply. You can use rate=500k to limit
1097 reads and writes to 500k each, or you can specify read and
1098 writes separately. Using rate=1m,500k would limit reads to
1099 1MB/sec and writes to 500KB/sec. Capping only reads or
1100 writes can be done with rate=,500k or rate=500k,. The former
1101 will only limit writes (to 500KB/sec), the latter will only
1102 limit reads.
1103
1104rate_min=int Tell fio to do whatever it can to maintain at least this
1105 bandwidth. Failing to meet this requirement, will cause
1106 the job to exit. The same format as rate is used for
1107 read vs write separation.
1108
1109rate_iops=int Cap the bandwidth to this number of IOPS. Basically the same
1110 as rate, just specified independently of bandwidth. If the
1111 job is given a block size range instead of a fixed value,
1112 the smallest block size is used as the metric. The same format
1113 as rate is used for read vs write separation.
1114
1115rate_iops_min=int If fio doesn't meet this rate of IO, it will cause
1116 the job to exit. The same format as rate is used for read vs
1117 write separation.
1118
1119rate_process=str This option controls how fio manages rated IO
1120 submissions. The default is 'linear', which submits IO in a
1121 linear fashion with fixed delays between IOs that gets
1122 adjusted based on IO completion rates. If this is set to
1123 'poisson', fio will submit IO based on a more real world
1124 random request flow, known as the Poisson process
1125 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_process). The lambda
1126 will be 10^6 / IOPS for the given workload.
1127
1128latency_target=int If set, fio will attempt to find the max performance
1129 point that the given workload will run at while maintaining a
1130 latency below this target. The values is given in microseconds.
1131 See latency_window and latency_percentile
1132
1133latency_window=int Used with latency_target to specify the sample window
1134 that the job is run at varying queue depths to test the
1135 performance. The value is given in microseconds.
1136
1137latency_percentile=float The percentage of IOs that must fall within the
1138 criteria specified by latency_target and latency_window. If not
1139 set, this defaults to 100.0, meaning that all IOs must be equal
1140 or below to the value set by latency_target.
1141
1142max_latency=int If set, fio will exit the job if it exceeds this maximum
1143 latency. It will exit with an ETIME error.
1144
1145rate_cycle=int Average bandwidth for 'rate' and 'rate_min' over this number
1146 of milliseconds.
1147
1148cpumask=int Set the CPU affinity of this job. The parameter given is a
1149 bitmask of allowed CPU's the job may run on. So if you want
1150 the allowed CPUs to be 1 and 5, you would pass the decimal
1151 value of (1 << 1 | 1 << 5), or 34. See man
1152 sched_setaffinity(2). This may not work on all supported
1153 operating systems or kernel versions. This option doesn't
1154 work well for a higher CPU count than what you can store in
1155 an integer mask, so it can only control cpus 1-32. For
1156 boxes with larger CPU counts, use cpus_allowed.
1157
1158cpus_allowed=str Controls the same options as cpumask, but it allows a text
1159 setting of the permitted CPUs instead. So to use CPUs 1 and
1160 5, you would specify cpus_allowed=1,5. This options also
1161 allows a range of CPUs. Say you wanted a binding to CPUs
1162 1, 5, and 8-15, you would set cpus_allowed=1,5,8-15.
1163
1164cpus_allowed_policy=str Set the policy of how fio distributes the CPUs
1165 specified by cpus_allowed or cpumask. Two policies are
1166 supported:
1167
1168 shared All jobs will share the CPU set specified.
1169 split Each job will get a unique CPU from the CPU set.
1170
1171 'shared' is the default behaviour, if the option isn't
1172 specified. If split is specified, then fio will will assign
1173 one cpu per job. If not enough CPUs are given for the jobs
1174 listed, then fio will roundrobin the CPUs in the set.
1175
1176numa_cpu_nodes=str Set this job running on spcified NUMA nodes' CPUs. The
1177 arguments allow comma delimited list of cpu numbers,
1178 A-B ranges, or 'all'. Note, to enable numa options support,
1179 fio must be built on a system with libnuma-dev(el) installed.
1180
1181numa_mem_policy=str Set this job's memory policy and corresponding NUMA
1182 nodes. Format of the argements:
1183 <mode>[:<nodelist>]
1184 `mode' is one of the following memory policy:
1185 default, prefer, bind, interleave, local
1186 For `default' and `local' memory policy, no node is
1187 needed to be specified.
1188 For `prefer', only one node is allowed.
1189 For `bind' and `interleave', it allow comma delimited
1190 list of numbers, A-B ranges, or 'all'.
1191
1192startdelay=time Start this job the specified number of seconds after fio
1193 has started. Only useful if the job file contains several
1194 jobs, and you want to delay starting some jobs to a certain
1195 time.
1196
1197runtime=time Tell fio to terminate processing after the specified number
1198 of seconds. It can be quite hard to determine for how long
1199 a specified job will run, so this parameter is handy to
1200 cap the total runtime to a given time.
1201
1202time_based If set, fio will run for the duration of the runtime
1203 specified even if the file(s) are completely read or
1204 written. It will simply loop over the same workload
1205 as many times as the runtime allows.
1206
1207ramp_time=time If set, fio will run the specified workload for this amount
1208 of time before logging any performance numbers. Useful for
1209 letting performance settle before logging results, thus
1210 minimizing the runtime required for stable results. Note
1211 that the ramp_time is considered lead in time for a job,
1212 thus it will increase the total runtime if a special timeout
1213 or runtime is specified.
1214
1215invalidate=bool Invalidate the buffer/page cache parts for this file prior
1216 to starting io. Defaults to true.
1217
1218sync=bool Use sync io for buffered writes. For the majority of the
1219 io engines, this means using O_SYNC.
1220
1221iomem=str
1222mem=str Fio can use various types of memory as the io unit buffer.
1223 The allowed values are:
1224
1225 malloc Use memory from malloc(3) as the buffers.
1226
1227 shm Use shared memory as the buffers. Allocated
1228 through shmget(2).
1229
1230 shmhuge Same as shm, but use huge pages as backing.
1231
1232 mmap Use mmap to allocate buffers. May either be
1233 anonymous memory, or can be file backed if
1234 a filename is given after the option. The
1235 format is mem=mmap:/path/to/file.
1236
1237 mmaphuge Use a memory mapped huge file as the buffer
1238 backing. Append filename after mmaphuge, ala
1239 mem=mmaphuge:/hugetlbfs/file
1240
1241 mmapshared Same as mmap, but use a MMAP_SHARED
1242 mapping.
1243
1244 The area allocated is a function of the maximum allowed
1245 bs size for the job, multiplied by the io depth given. Note
1246 that for shmhuge and mmaphuge to work, the system must have
1247 free huge pages allocated. This can normally be checked
1248 and set by reading/writing /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages on a
1249 Linux system. Fio assumes a huge page is 4MB in size. So
1250 to calculate the number of huge pages you need for a given
1251 job file, add up the io depth of all jobs (normally one unless
1252 iodepth= is used) and multiply by the maximum bs set. Then
1253 divide that number by the huge page size. You can see the
1254 size of the huge pages in /proc/meminfo. If no huge pages
1255 are allocated by having a non-zero number in nr_hugepages,
1256 using mmaphuge or shmhuge will fail. Also see hugepage-size.
1257
1258 mmaphuge also needs to have hugetlbfs mounted and the file
1259 location should point there. So if it's mounted in /huge,
1260 you would use mem=mmaphuge:/huge/somefile.
1261
1262iomem_align=int This indiciates the memory alignment of the IO memory buffers.
1263 Note that the given alignment is applied to the first IO unit
1264 buffer, if using iodepth the alignment of the following buffers
1265 are given by the bs used. In other words, if using a bs that is
1266 a multiple of the page sized in the system, all buffers will
1267 be aligned to this value. If using a bs that is not page
1268 aligned, the alignment of subsequent IO memory buffers is the
1269 sum of the iomem_align and bs used.
1270
1271hugepage-size=int
1272 Defines the size of a huge page. Must at least be equal
1273 to the system setting, see /proc/meminfo. Defaults to 4MB.
1274 Should probably always be a multiple of megabytes, so using
1275 hugepage-size=Xm is the preferred way to set this to avoid
1276 setting a non-pow-2 bad value.
1277
1278exitall When one job finishes, terminate the rest. The default is
1279 to wait for each job to finish, sometimes that is not the
1280 desired action.
1281
1282exitall_on_error When one job finishes in error, terminate the rest. The
1283 default is to wait for each job to finish.
1284
1285bwavgtime=int Average the calculated bandwidth over the given time. Value
1286 is specified in milliseconds. If the job also does bandwidth
1287 logging through 'write_bw_log', then the minimum of this option
1288 and 'log_avg_msec' will be used. Default: 500ms.
1289
1290iopsavgtime=int Average the calculated IOPS over the given time. Value
1291 is specified in milliseconds. If the job also does IOPS logging
1292 through 'write_iops_log', then the minimum of this option and
1293 'log_avg_msec' will be used. Default: 500ms.
1294
1295create_serialize=bool If true, serialize the file creating for the jobs.
1296 This may be handy to avoid interleaving of data
1297 files, which may greatly depend on the filesystem
1298 used and even the number of processors in the system.
1299
1300create_fsync=bool fsync the data file after creation. This is the
1301 default.
1302
1303create_on_open=bool Don't pre-setup the files for IO, just create open()
1304 when it's time to do IO to that file.
1305
1306create_only=bool If true, fio will only run the setup phase of the job.
1307 If files need to be laid out or updated on disk, only
1308 that will be done. The actual job contents are not
1309 executed.
1310
1311allow_file_create=bool If true, fio is permitted to create files as part
1312 of its workload. This is the default behavior. If this
1313 option is false, then fio will error out if the files it
1314 needs to use don't already exist. Default: true.
1315
1316allow_mounted_write=bool If this isn't set, fio will abort jobs that
1317 are destructive (eg that write) to what appears to be a
1318 mounted device or partition. This should help catch creating
1319 inadvertently destructive tests, not realizing that the test
1320 will destroy data on the mounted file system. Default: false.
1321
1322pre_read=bool If this is given, files will be pre-read into memory before
1323 starting the given IO operation. This will also clear
1324 the 'invalidate' flag, since it is pointless to pre-read
1325 and then drop the cache. This will only work for IO engines
1326 that are seekable, since they allow you to read the same data
1327 multiple times. Thus it will not work on eg network or splice
1328 IO.
1329
1330unlink=bool Unlink the job files when done. Not the default, as repeated
1331 runs of that job would then waste time recreating the file
1332 set again and again.
1333
1334loops=int Run the specified number of iterations of this job. Used
1335 to repeat the same workload a given number of times. Defaults
1336 to 1.
1337
1338verify_only Do not perform specified workload---only verify data still
1339 matches previous invocation of this workload. This option
1340 allows one to check data multiple times at a later date
1341 without overwriting it. This option makes sense only for
1342 workloads that write data, and does not support workloads
1343 with the time_based option set.
1344
1345do_verify=bool Run the verify phase after a write phase. Only makes sense if
1346 verify is set. Defaults to 1.
1347
1348verify=str If writing to a file, fio can verify the file contents
1349 after each iteration of the job. Each verification method also implies
1350 verification of special header, which is written to the beginning of
1351 each block. This header also includes meta information, like offset
1352 of the block, block number, timestamp when block was written, etc.
1353 verify=str can be combined with verify_pattern=str option.
1354 The allowed values are:
1355
1356 md5 Use an md5 sum of the data area and store
1357 it in the header of each block.
1358
1359 crc64 Use an experimental crc64 sum of the data
1360 area and store it in the header of each
1361 block.
1362
1363 crc32c Use a crc32c sum of the data area and store
1364 it in the header of each block.
1365
1366 crc32c-intel Use hardware assisted crc32c calcuation
1367 provided on SSE4.2 enabled processors. Falls
1368 back to regular software crc32c, if not
1369 supported by the system.
1370
1371 crc32 Use a crc32 sum of the data area and store
1372 it in the header of each block.
1373
1374 crc16 Use a crc16 sum of the data area and store
1375 it in the header of each block.
1376
1377 crc7 Use a crc7 sum of the data area and store
1378 it in the header of each block.
1379
1380 xxhash Use xxhash as the checksum function. Generally
1381 the fastest software checksum that fio
1382 supports.
1383
1384 sha512 Use sha512 as the checksum function.
1385
1386 sha256 Use sha256 as the checksum function.
1387
1388 sha1 Use optimized sha1 as the checksum function.
1389
1390 meta This option is deprecated, since now meta information is
1391 included in generic verification header and meta verification
1392 happens by default. For detailed information see the description
1393 of the verify=str setting. This option is kept because of
1394 compatibility's sake with old configurations. Do not use it.
1395
1396 pattern Verify a strict pattern. Normally fio includes
1397 a header with some basic information and
1398 checksumming, but if this option is set, only
1399 the specific pattern set with 'verify_pattern'
1400 is verified.
1401
1402 null Only pretend to verify. Useful for testing
1403 internals with ioengine=null, not for much
1404 else.
1405
1406 This option can be used for repeated burn-in tests of a
1407 system to make sure that the written data is also
1408 correctly read back. If the data direction given is
1409 a read or random read, fio will assume that it should
1410 verify a previously written file. If the data direction
1411 includes any form of write, the verify will be of the
1412 newly written data.
1413
1414verifysort=bool If set, fio will sort written verify blocks when it deems
1415 it faster to read them back in a sorted manner. This is
1416 often the case when overwriting an existing file, since
1417 the blocks are already laid out in the file system. You
1418 can ignore this option unless doing huge amounts of really
1419 fast IO where the red-black tree sorting CPU time becomes
1420 significant.
1421
1422verify_offset=int Swap the verification header with data somewhere else
1423 in the block before writing. Its swapped back before
1424 verifying.
1425
1426verify_interval=int Write the verification header at a finer granularity
1427 than the blocksize. It will be written for chunks the
1428 size of header_interval. blocksize should divide this
1429 evenly.
1430
1431verify_pattern=str If set, fio will fill the io buffers with this
1432 pattern. Fio defaults to filling with totally random
1433 bytes, but sometimes it's interesting to fill with a known
1434 pattern for io verification purposes. Depending on the
1435 width of the pattern, fio will fill 1/2/3/4 bytes of the
1436 buffer at the time(it can be either a decimal or a hex number).
1437 The verify_pattern if larger than a 32-bit quantity has to
1438 be a hex number that starts with either "0x" or "0X". Use
1439 with verify=str. Also, verify_pattern supports %o format,
1440 which means that for each block offset will be written and
1441 then verifyied back, e.g.:
1442
1443 verify_pattern=%o
1444
1445 Or use combination of everything:
1446 verify_pattern=0xff%o"abcd"-12
1447
1448verify_fatal=bool Normally fio will keep checking the entire contents
1449 before quitting on a block verification failure. If this
1450 option is set, fio will exit the job on the first observed
1451 failure.
1452
1453verify_dump=bool If set, dump the contents of both the original data
1454 block and the data block we read off disk to files. This
1455 allows later analysis to inspect just what kind of data
1456 corruption occurred. Off by default.
1457
1458verify_async=int Fio will normally verify IO inline from the submitting
1459 thread. This option takes an integer describing how many
1460 async offload threads to create for IO verification instead,
1461 causing fio to offload the duty of verifying IO contents
1462 to one or more separate threads. If using this offload
1463 option, even sync IO engines can benefit from using an
1464 iodepth setting higher than 1, as it allows them to have
1465 IO in flight while verifies are running.
1466
1467verify_async_cpus=str Tell fio to set the given CPU affinity on the
1468 async IO verification threads. See cpus_allowed for the
1469 format used.
1470
1471verify_backlog=int Fio will normally verify the written contents of a
1472 job that utilizes verify once that job has completed. In
1473 other words, everything is written then everything is read
1474 back and verified. You may want to verify continually
1475 instead for a variety of reasons. Fio stores the meta data
1476 associated with an IO block in memory, so for large
1477 verify workloads, quite a bit of memory would be used up
1478 holding this meta data. If this option is enabled, fio
1479 will write only N blocks before verifying these blocks.
1480
1481verify_backlog_batch=int Control how many blocks fio will verify
1482 if verify_backlog is set. If not set, will default to
1483 the value of verify_backlog (meaning the entire queue
1484 is read back and verified). If verify_backlog_batch is
1485 less than verify_backlog then not all blocks will be verified,
1486 if verify_backlog_batch is larger than verify_backlog, some
1487 blocks will be verified more than once.
1488
1489verify_state_save=bool When a job exits during the write phase of a verify
1490 workload, save its current state. This allows fio to replay
1491 up until that point, if the verify state is loaded for the
1492 verify read phase. The format of the filename is, roughly,
1493 <type>-<jobname>-<jobindex>-verify.state. <type> is "local"
1494 for a local run, "sock" for a client/server socket connection,
1495 and "ip" (192.168.0.1, for instance) for a networked
1496 client/server connection.
1497
1498verify_state_load=bool If a verify termination trigger was used, fio stores
1499 the current write state of each thread. This can be used at
1500 verification time so that fio knows how far it should verify.
1501 Without this information, fio will run a full verification
1502 pass, according to the settings in the job file used.
1503
1504stonewall
1505wait_for_previous Wait for preceding jobs in the job file to exit, before
1506 starting this one. Can be used to insert serialization
1507 points in the job file. A stone wall also implies starting
1508 a new reporting group.
1509
1510new_group Start a new reporting group. See: group_reporting.
1511
1512numjobs=int Create the specified number of clones of this job. May be
1513 used to setup a larger number of threads/processes doing
1514 the same thing. Each thread is reported separately; to see
1515 statistics for all clones as a whole, use group_reporting in
1516 conjunction with new_group.
1517
1518group_reporting It may sometimes be interesting to display statistics for
1519 groups of jobs as a whole instead of for each individual job.
1520 This is especially true if 'numjobs' is used; looking at
1521 individual thread/process output quickly becomes unwieldy.
1522 To see the final report per-group instead of per-job, use
1523 'group_reporting'. Jobs in a file will be part of the same
1524 reporting group, unless if separated by a stonewall, or by
1525 using 'new_group'.
1526
1527thread fio defaults to forking jobs, however if this option is
1528 given, fio will use pthread_create(3) to create threads
1529 instead.
1530
1531zonesize=int Divide a file into zones of the specified size. See zoneskip.
1532
1533zoneskip=int Skip the specified number of bytes when zonesize data has
1534 been read. The two zone options can be used to only do
1535 io on zones of a file.
1536
1537write_iolog=str Write the issued io patterns to the specified file. See
1538 read_iolog. Specify a separate file for each job, otherwise
1539 the iologs will be interspersed and the file may be corrupt.
1540
1541read_iolog=str Open an iolog with the specified file name and replay the
1542 io patterns it contains. This can be used to store a
1543 workload and replay it sometime later. The iolog given
1544 may also be a blktrace binary file, which allows fio
1545 to replay a workload captured by blktrace. See blktrace
1546 for how to capture such logging data. For blktrace replay,
1547 the file needs to be turned into a blkparse binary data
1548 file first (blkparse <device> -o /dev/null -d file_for_fio.bin).
1549
1550replay_no_stall=int When replaying I/O with read_iolog the default behavior
1551 is to attempt to respect the time stamps within the log and
1552 replay them with the appropriate delay between IOPS. By
1553 setting this variable fio will not respect the timestamps and
1554 attempt to replay them as fast as possible while still
1555 respecting ordering. The result is the same I/O pattern to a
1556 given device, but different timings.
1557
1558replay_redirect=str While replaying I/O patterns using read_iolog the
1559 default behavior is to replay the IOPS onto the major/minor
1560 device that each IOP was recorded from. This is sometimes
1561 undesirable because on a different machine those major/minor
1562 numbers can map to a different device. Changing hardware on
1563 the same system can also result in a different major/minor
1564 mapping. Replay_redirect causes all IOPS to be replayed onto
1565 the single specified device regardless of the device it was
1566 recorded from. i.e. replay_redirect=/dev/sdc would cause all
1567 IO in the blktrace to be replayed onto /dev/sdc. This means
1568 multiple devices will be replayed onto a single, if the trace
1569 contains multiple devices. If you want multiple devices to be
1570 replayed concurrently to multiple redirected devices you must
1571 blkparse your trace into separate traces and replay them with
1572 independent fio invocations. Unfortuantely this also breaks
1573 the strict time ordering between multiple device accesses.
1574
1575replay_align=int Force alignment of IO offsets and lengths in a trace
1576 to this power of 2 value.
1577
1578replay_scale=int Scale sector offsets down by this factor when
1579 replaying traces.
1580
1581per_job_logs=bool If set, this generates bw/clat/iops log with per
1582 file private filenames. If not set, jobs with identical names
1583 will share the log filename. Default: true.
1584
1585write_bw_log=str If given, write a bandwidth log of the jobs in this job
1586 file. Can be used to store data of the bandwidth of the
1587 jobs in their lifetime. The included fio_generate_plots
1588 script uses gnuplot to turn these text files into nice
1589 graphs. See write_lat_log for behaviour of given
1590 filename. For this option, the suffix is _bw.x.log, where
1591 x is the index of the job (1..N, where N is the number of
1592 jobs). If 'per_job_logs' is false, then the filename will not
1593 include the job index. See 'Log File Formats'.
1594
1595write_lat_log=str Same as write_bw_log, except that this option stores io
1596 submission, completion, and total latencies instead. If no
1597 filename is given with this option, the default filename of
1598 "jobname_type.log" is used. Even if the filename is given,
1599 fio will still append the type of log. So if one specifies
1600
1601 write_lat_log=foo
1602
1603 The actual log names will be foo_slat.x.log, foo_clat.x.log,
1604 and foo_lat.x.log, where x is the index of the job (1..N,
1605 where N is the number of jobs). This helps fio_generate_plot
1606 fine the logs automatically. If 'per_job_logs' is false, then
1607 the filename will not include the job index. See 'Log File
1608 Formats'.
1609
1610write_iops_log=str Same as write_bw_log, but writes IOPS. If no filename is
1611 given with this option, the default filename of
1612 "jobname_type.x.log" is used,where x is the index of the job
1613 (1..N, where N is the number of jobs). Even if the filename
1614 is given, fio will still append the type of log. If
1615 'per_job_logs' is false, then the filename will not include
1616 the job index. See 'Log File Formats'.
1617
1618log_avg_msec=int By default, fio will log an entry in the iops, latency,
1619 or bw log for every IO that completes. When writing to the
1620 disk log, that can quickly grow to a very large size. Setting
1621 this option makes fio average the each log entry over the
1622 specified period of time, reducing the resolution of the log.
1623 See log_max_value as well. Defaults to 0, logging all entries.
1624
1625log_max_value=bool If log_avg_msec is set, fio logs the average over that
1626 window. If you instead want to log the maximum value, set this
1627 option to 1. Defaults to 0, meaning that averaged values are
1628 logged.
1629
1630log_offset=int If this is set, the iolog options will include the byte
1631 offset for the IO entry as well as the other data values.
1632
1633log_compression=int If this is set, fio will compress the IO logs as
1634 it goes, to keep the memory footprint lower. When a log
1635 reaches the specified size, that chunk is removed and
1636 compressed in the background. Given that IO logs are
1637 fairly highly compressible, this yields a nice memory
1638 savings for longer runs. The downside is that the
1639 compression will consume some background CPU cycles, so
1640 it may impact the run. This, however, is also true if
1641 the logging ends up consuming most of the system memory.
1642 So pick your poison. The IO logs are saved normally at the
1643 end of a run, by decompressing the chunks and storing them
1644 in the specified log file. This feature depends on the
1645 availability of zlib.
1646
1647log_compression_cpus=str Define the set of CPUs that are allowed to
1648 handle online log compression for the IO jobs. This can
1649 provide better isolation between performance sensitive jobs,
1650 and background compression work.
1651
1652log_store_compressed=bool If set, fio will store the log files in a
1653 compressed format. They can be decompressed with fio, using
1654 the --inflate-log command line parameter. The files will be
1655 stored with a .fz suffix.
1656
1657block_error_percentiles=bool If set, record errors in trim block-sized
1658 units from writes and trims and output a histogram of
1659 how many trims it took to get to errors, and what kind
1660 of error was encountered.
1661
1662lockmem=int Pin down the specified amount of memory with mlock(2). Can
1663 potentially be used instead of removing memory or booting
1664 with less memory to simulate a smaller amount of memory.
1665 The amount specified is per worker.
1666
1667exec_prerun=str Before running this job, issue the command specified
1668 through system(3). Output is redirected in a file called
1669 jobname.prerun.txt.
1670
1671exec_postrun=str After the job completes, issue the command specified
1672 though system(3). Output is redirected in a file called
1673 jobname.postrun.txt.
1674
1675ioscheduler=str Attempt to switch the device hosting the file to the specified
1676 io scheduler before running.
1677
1678disk_util=bool Generate disk utilization statistics, if the platform
1679 supports it. Defaults to on.
1680
1681disable_lat=bool Disable measurements of total latency numbers. Useful
1682 only for cutting back the number of calls to gettimeofday,
1683 as that does impact performance at really high IOPS rates.
1684 Note that to really get rid of a large amount of these
1685 calls, this option must be used with disable_slat and
1686 disable_bw as well.
1687
1688disable_clat=bool Disable measurements of completion latency numbers. See
1689 disable_lat.
1690
1691disable_slat=bool Disable measurements of submission latency numbers. See
1692 disable_slat.
1693
1694disable_bw=bool Disable measurements of throughput/bandwidth numbers. See
1695 disable_lat.
1696
1697clat_percentiles=bool Enable the reporting of percentiles of
1698 completion latencies.
1699
1700percentile_list=float_list Overwrite the default list of percentiles
1701 for completion latencies and the block error histogram.
1702 Each number is a floating number in the range (0,100],
1703 and the maximum length of the list is 20. Use ':'
1704 to separate the numbers, and list the numbers in ascending
1705 order. For example, --percentile_list=99.5:99.9 will cause
1706 fio to report the values of completion latency below which
1707 99.5% and 99.9% of the observed latencies fell, respectively.
1708
1709clocksource=str Use the given clocksource as the base of timing. The
1710 supported options are:
1711
1712 gettimeofday gettimeofday(2)
1713
1714 clock_gettime clock_gettime(2)
1715
1716 cpu Internal CPU clock source
1717
1718 cpu is the preferred clocksource if it is reliable, as it
1719 is very fast (and fio is heavy on time calls). Fio will
1720 automatically use this clocksource if it's supported and
1721 considered reliable on the system it is running on, unless
1722 another clocksource is specifically set. For x86/x86-64 CPUs,
1723 this means supporting TSC Invariant.
1724
1725gtod_reduce=bool Enable all of the gettimeofday() reducing options
1726 (disable_clat, disable_slat, disable_bw) plus reduce
1727 precision of the timeout somewhat to really shrink
1728 the gettimeofday() call count. With this option enabled,
1729 we only do about 0.4% of the gtod() calls we would have
1730 done if all time keeping was enabled.
1731
1732gtod_cpu=int Sometimes it's cheaper to dedicate a single thread of
1733 execution to just getting the current time. Fio (and
1734 databases, for instance) are very intensive on gettimeofday()
1735 calls. With this option, you can set one CPU aside for
1736 doing nothing but logging current time to a shared memory
1737 location. Then the other threads/processes that run IO
1738 workloads need only copy that segment, instead of entering
1739 the kernel with a gettimeofday() call. The CPU set aside
1740 for doing these time calls will be excluded from other
1741 uses. Fio will manually clear it from the CPU mask of other
1742 jobs.
1743
1744continue_on_error=str Normally fio will exit the job on the first observed
1745 failure. If this option is set, fio will continue the job when
1746 there is a 'non-fatal error' (EIO or EILSEQ) until the runtime
1747 is exceeded or the I/O size specified is completed. If this
1748 option is used, there are two more stats that are appended,
1749 the total error count and the first error. The error field
1750 given in the stats is the first error that was hit during the
1751 run.
1752
1753 The allowed values are:
1754
1755 none Exit on any IO or verify errors.
1756
1757 read Continue on read errors, exit on all others.
1758
1759 write Continue on write errors, exit on all others.
1760
1761 io Continue on any IO error, exit on all others.
1762
1763 verify Continue on verify errors, exit on all others.
1764
1765 all Continue on all errors.
1766
1767 0 Backward-compatible alias for 'none'.
1768
1769 1 Backward-compatible alias for 'all'.
1770
1771ignore_error=str Sometimes you want to ignore some errors during test
1772 in that case you can specify error list for each error type.
1773 ignore_error=READ_ERR_LIST,WRITE_ERR_LIST,VERIFY_ERR_LIST
1774 errors for given error type is separated with ':'. Error
1775 may be symbol ('ENOSPC', 'ENOMEM') or integer.
1776 Example:
1777 ignore_error=EAGAIN,ENOSPC:122
1778 This option will ignore EAGAIN from READ, and ENOSPC and
1779 122(EDQUOT) from WRITE.
1780
1781error_dump=bool If set dump every error even if it is non fatal, true
1782 by default. If disabled only fatal error will be dumped
1783
1784cgroup=str Add job to this control group. If it doesn't exist, it will
1785 be created. The system must have a mounted cgroup blkio
1786 mount point for this to work. If your system doesn't have it
1787 mounted, you can do so with:
1788
1789 # mount -t cgroup -o blkio none /cgroup
1790
1791cgroup_weight=int Set the weight of the cgroup to this value. See
1792 the documentation that comes with the kernel, allowed values
1793 are in the range of 100..1000.
1794
1795cgroup_nodelete=bool Normally fio will delete the cgroups it has created after
1796 the job completion. To override this behavior and to leave
1797 cgroups around after the job completion, set cgroup_nodelete=1.
1798 This can be useful if one wants to inspect various cgroup
1799 files after job completion. Default: false
1800
1801uid=int Instead of running as the invoking user, set the user ID to
1802 this value before the thread/process does any work.
1803
1804gid=int Set group ID, see uid.
1805
1806flow_id=int The ID of the flow. If not specified, it defaults to being a
1807 global flow. See flow.
1808
1809flow=int Weight in token-based flow control. If this value is used, then
1810 there is a 'flow counter' which is used to regulate the
1811 proportion of activity between two or more jobs. fio attempts
1812 to keep this flow counter near zero. The 'flow' parameter
1813 stands for how much should be added or subtracted to the flow
1814 counter on each iteration of the main I/O loop. That is, if
1815 one job has flow=8 and another job has flow=-1, then there
1816 will be a roughly 1:8 ratio in how much one runs vs the other.
1817
1818flow_watermark=int The maximum value that the absolute value of the flow
1819 counter is allowed to reach before the job must wait for a
1820 lower value of the counter.
1821
1822flow_sleep=int The period of time, in microseconds, to wait after the flow
1823 watermark has been exceeded before retrying operations
1824
1825In addition, there are some parameters which are only valid when a specific
1826ioengine is in use. These are used identically to normal parameters, with the
1827caveat that when used on the command line, they must come after the ioengine
1828that defines them is selected.
1829
1830[libaio] userspace_reap Normally, with the libaio engine in use, fio will use
1831 the io_getevents system call to reap newly returned events.
1832 With this flag turned on, the AIO ring will be read directly
1833 from user-space to reap events. The reaping mode is only
1834 enabled when polling for a minimum of 0 events (eg when
1835 iodepth_batch_complete=0).
1836
1837[psyncv2] hipri Set RWF_HIPRI on IO, indicating to the kernel that
1838 it's of higher priority than normal.
1839
1840[cpu] cpuload=int Attempt to use the specified percentage of CPU cycles.
1841
1842[cpu] cpuchunks=int Split the load into cycles of the given time. In
1843 microseconds.
1844
1845[cpu] exit_on_io_done=bool Detect when IO threads are done, then exit.
1846
1847[netsplice] hostname=str
1848[net] hostname=str The host name or IP address to use for TCP or UDP based IO.
1849 If the job is a TCP listener or UDP reader, the hostname is not
1850 used and must be omitted unless it is a valid UDP multicast
1851 address.
1852[libhdfs] namenode=str The host name or IP address of a HDFS cluster namenode to contact.
1853
1854[netsplice] port=int
1855[net] port=int The TCP or UDP port to bind to or connect to. If this is used
1856with numjobs to spawn multiple instances of the same job type, then this will
1857be the starting port number since fio will use a range of ports.
1858[libhdfs] port=int the listening port of the HFDS cluster namenode.
1859
1860[netsplice] interface=str
1861[net] interface=str The IP address of the network interface used to send or
1862 receive UDP multicast
1863
1864[netsplice] ttl=int
1865[net] ttl=int Time-to-live value for outgoing UDP multicast packets.
1866 Default: 1
1867
1868[netsplice] nodelay=bool
1869[net] nodelay=bool Set TCP_NODELAY on TCP connections.
1870
1871[netsplice] protocol=str
1872[netsplice] proto=str
1873[net] protocol=str
1874[net] proto=str The network protocol to use. Accepted values are:
1875
1876 tcp Transmission control protocol
1877 tcpv6 Transmission control protocol V6
1878 udp User datagram protocol
1879 udpv6 User datagram protocol V6
1880 unix UNIX domain socket
1881
1882 When the protocol is TCP or UDP, the port must also be given,
1883 as well as the hostname if the job is a TCP listener or UDP
1884 reader. For unix sockets, the normal filename option should be
1885 used and the port is invalid.
1886
1887[net] listen For TCP network connections, tell fio to listen for incoming
1888 connections rather than initiating an outgoing connection. The
1889 hostname must be omitted if this option is used.
1890
1891[net] pingpong Normaly a network writer will just continue writing data, and
1892 a network reader will just consume packages. If pingpong=1
1893 is set, a writer will send its normal payload to the reader,
1894 then wait for the reader to send the same payload back. This
1895 allows fio to measure network latencies. The submission
1896 and completion latencies then measure local time spent
1897 sending or receiving, and the completion latency measures
1898 how long it took for the other end to receive and send back.
1899 For UDP multicast traffic pingpong=1 should only be set for a
1900 single reader when multiple readers are listening to the same
1901 address.
1902
1903[net] window_size Set the desired socket buffer size for the connection.
1904
1905[net] mss Set the TCP maximum segment size (TCP_MAXSEG).
1906
1907[e4defrag] donorname=str
1908 File will be used as a block donor(swap extents between files)
1909[e4defrag] inplace=int
1910 Configure donor file blocks allocation strategy
1911 0(default): Preallocate donor's file on init
1912 1 : allocate space immidietly inside defragment event,
1913 and free right after event
1914
1915[rbd] clustername=str Specifies the name of the Ceph cluster.
1916[rbd] rbdname=str Specifies the name of the RBD.
1917[rbd] pool=str Specifies the naem of the Ceph pool containing RBD.
1918[rbd] clientname=str Specifies the username (without the 'client.' prefix)
1919 used to access the Ceph cluster. If the clustername is
1920 specified, the clientmae shall be the full type.id
1921 string. If no type. prefix is given, fio will add
1922 'client.' by default.
1923
1924[mtd] skip_bad=bool Skip operations against known bad blocks.
1925
1926[libhdfs] hdfsdirectory libhdfs will create chunk in this HDFS directory
1927[libhdfs] chunck_size the size of the chunck to use for each file.
1928
1929
19306.0 Interpreting the output
1931---------------------------
1932
1933fio spits out a lot of output. While running, fio will display the
1934status of the jobs created. An example of that would be:
1935
1936Threads: 1: [_r] [24.8% done] [ 13509/ 8334 kb/s] [eta 00h:01m:31s]
1937
1938The characters inside the square brackets denote the current status of
1939each thread. The possible values (in typical life cycle order) are:
1940
1941Idle Run
1942---- ---
1943P Thread setup, but not started.
1944C Thread created.
1945I Thread initialized, waiting or generating necessary data.
1946 p Thread running pre-reading file(s).
1947 R Running, doing sequential reads.
1948 r Running, doing random reads.
1949 W Running, doing sequential writes.
1950 w Running, doing random writes.
1951 M Running, doing mixed sequential reads/writes.
1952 m Running, doing mixed random reads/writes.
1953 F Running, currently waiting for fsync()
1954 f Running, finishing up (writing IO logs, etc)
1955 V Running, doing verification of written data.
1956E Thread exited, not reaped by main thread yet.
1957_ Thread reaped, or
1958X Thread reaped, exited with an error.
1959K Thread reaped, exited due to signal.
1960
1961Fio will condense the thread string as not to take up more space on the
1962command line as is needed. For instance, if you have 10 readers and 10
1963writers running, the output would look like this:
1964
1965Jobs: 20 (f=20): [R(10),W(10)] [4.0% done] [2103MB/0KB/0KB /s] [538K/0/0 iops] [eta 57m:36s]
1966
1967Fio will still maintain the ordering, though. So the above means that jobs
19681..10 are readers, and 11..20 are writers.
1969
1970The other values are fairly self explanatory - number of threads
1971currently running and doing io, rate of io since last check (read speed
1972listed first, then write speed), and the estimated completion percentage
1973and time for the running group. It's impossible to estimate runtime of
1974the following groups (if any). Note that the string is displayed in order,
1975so it's possible to tell which of the jobs are currently doing what. The
1976first character is the first job defined in the job file, and so forth.
1977
1978When fio is done (or interrupted by ctrl-c), it will show the data for
1979each thread, group of threads, and disks in that order. For each data
1980direction, the output looks like:
1981
1982Client1 (g=0): err= 0:
1983 write: io= 32MB, bw= 666KB/s, iops=89 , runt= 50320msec
1984 slat (msec): min= 0, max= 136, avg= 0.03, stdev= 1.92
1985 clat (msec): min= 0, max= 631, avg=48.50, stdev=86.82
1986 bw (KB/s) : min= 0, max= 1196, per=51.00%, avg=664.02, stdev=681.68
1987 cpu : usr=1.49%, sys=0.25%, ctx=7969, majf=0, minf=17
1988 IO depths : 1=0.1%, 2=0.3%, 4=0.5%, 8=99.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >32=0.0%
1989 submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
1990 complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
1991 issued r/w: total=0/32768, short=0/0
1992 lat (msec): 2=1.6%, 4=0.0%, 10=3.2%, 20=12.8%, 50=38.4%, 100=24.8%,
1993 lat (msec): 250=15.2%, 500=0.0%, 750=0.0%, 1000=0.0%, >=2048=0.0%
1994
1995The client number is printed, along with the group id and error of that
1996thread. Below is the io statistics, here for writes. In the order listed,
1997they denote:
1998
1999io= Number of megabytes io performed
2000bw= Average bandwidth rate
2001iops= Average IOs performed per second
2002runt= The runtime of that thread
2003 slat= Submission latency (avg being the average, stdev being the
2004 standard deviation). This is the time it took to submit
2005 the io. For sync io, the slat is really the completion
2006 latency, since queue/complete is one operation there. This
2007 value can be in milliseconds or microseconds, fio will choose
2008 the most appropriate base and print that. In the example
2009 above, milliseconds is the best scale. Note: in --minimal mode
2010 latencies are always expressed in microseconds.
2011 clat= Completion latency. Same names as slat, this denotes the
2012 time from submission to completion of the io pieces. For
2013 sync io, clat will usually be equal (or very close) to 0,
2014 as the time from submit to complete is basically just
2015 CPU time (io has already been done, see slat explanation).
2016 bw= Bandwidth. Same names as the xlat stats, but also includes
2017 an approximate percentage of total aggregate bandwidth
2018 this thread received in this group. This last value is
2019 only really useful if the threads in this group are on the
2020 same disk, since they are then competing for disk access.
2021cpu= CPU usage. User and system time, along with the number
2022 of context switches this thread went through, usage of
2023 system and user time, and finally the number of major
2024 and minor page faults. The CPU utilization numbers are
2025 averages for the jobs in that reporting group, while the
2026 context and fault counters are summed.
2027IO depths= The distribution of io depths over the job life time. The
2028 numbers are divided into powers of 2, so for example the
2029 16= entries includes depths up to that value but higher
2030 than the previous entry. In other words, it covers the
2031 range from 16 to 31.
2032IO submit= How many pieces of IO were submitting in a single submit
2033 call. Each entry denotes that amount and below, until
2034 the previous entry - eg, 8=100% mean that we submitted
2035 anywhere in between 5-8 ios per submit call.
2036IO complete= Like the above submit number, but for completions instead.
2037IO issued= The number of read/write requests issued, and how many
2038 of them were short.
2039IO latencies= The distribution of IO completion latencies. This is the
2040 time from when IO leaves fio and when it gets completed.
2041 The numbers follow the same pattern as the IO depths,
2042 meaning that 2=1.6% means that 1.6% of the IO completed
2043 within 2 msecs, 20=12.8% means that 12.8% of the IO
2044 took more than 10 msecs, but less than (or equal to) 20 msecs.
2045
2046After each client has been listed, the group statistics are printed. They
2047will look like this:
2048
2049Run status group 0 (all jobs):
2050 READ: io=64MB, aggrb=22178, minb=11355, maxb=11814, mint=2840msec, maxt=2955msec
2051 WRITE: io=64MB, aggrb=1302, minb=666, maxb=669, mint=50093msec, maxt=50320msec
2052
2053For each data direction, it prints:
2054
2055io= Number of megabytes io performed.
2056aggrb= Aggregate bandwidth of threads in this group.
2057minb= The minimum average bandwidth a thread saw.
2058maxb= The maximum average bandwidth a thread saw.
2059mint= The smallest runtime of the threads in that group.
2060maxt= The longest runtime of the threads in that group.
2061
2062And finally, the disk statistics are printed. They will look like this:
2063
2064Disk stats (read/write):
2065 sda: ios=16398/16511, merge=30/162, ticks=6853/819634, in_queue=826487, util=100.00%
2066
2067Each value is printed for both reads and writes, with reads first. The
2068numbers denote:
2069
2070ios= Number of ios performed by all groups.
2071merge= Number of merges io the io scheduler.
2072ticks= Number of ticks we kept the disk busy.
2073io_queue= Total time spent in the disk queue.
2074util= The disk utilization. A value of 100% means we kept the disk
2075 busy constantly, 50% would be a disk idling half of the time.
2076
2077It is also possible to get fio to dump the current output while it is
2078running, without terminating the job. To do that, send fio the USR1 signal.
2079You can also get regularly timed dumps by using the --status-interval
2080parameter, or by creating a file in /tmp named fio-dump-status. If fio
2081sees this file, it will unlink it and dump the current output status.
2082
2083
20847.0 Terse output
2085----------------
2086
2087For scripted usage where you typically want to generate tables or graphs
2088of the results, fio can output the results in a semicolon separated format.
2089The format is one long line of values, such as:
2090
20912;card0;0;0;7139336;121836;60004;1;10109;27.932460;116.933948;220;126861;3495.446807;1085.368601;226;126864;3523.635629;1089.012448;24063;99944;50.275485%;59818.274627;5540.657370;7155060;122104;60004;1;8338;29.086342;117.839068;388;128077;5032.488518;1234.785715;391;128085;5061.839412;1236.909129;23436;100928;50.287926%;59964.832030;5644.844189;14.595833%;19.394167%;123706;0;7313;0.1%;0.1%;0.1%;0.1%;0.1%;0.1%;100.0%;0.00%;0.00%;0.00%;0.00%;0.00%;0.00%;0.01%;0.02%;0.05%;0.16%;6.04%;40.40%;52.68%;0.64%;0.01%;0.00%;0.01%;0.00%;0.00%;0.00%;0.00%;0.00%
2092A description of this job goes here.
2093
2094The job description (if provided) follows on a second line.
2095
2096To enable terse output, use the --minimal command line option. The first
2097value is the version of the terse output format. If the output has to
2098be changed for some reason, this number will be incremented by 1 to
2099signify that change.
2100
2101Split up, the format is as follows:
2102
2103 terse version, fio version, jobname, groupid, error
2104 READ status:
2105 Total IO (KB), bandwidth (KB/sec), IOPS, runtime (msec)
2106 Submission latency: min, max, mean, stdev (usec)
2107 Completion latency: min, max, mean, stdev (usec)
2108 Completion latency percentiles: 20 fields (see below)
2109 Total latency: min, max, mean, stdev (usec)
2110 Bw (KB/s): min, max, aggregate percentage of total, mean, stdev
2111 WRITE status:
2112 Total IO (KB), bandwidth (KB/sec), IOPS, runtime (msec)
2113 Submission latency: min, max, mean, stdev (usec)
2114 Completion latency: min, max, mean, stdev(usec)
2115 Completion latency percentiles: 20 fields (see below)
2116 Total latency: min, max, mean, stdev (usec)
2117 Bw (KB/s): min, max, aggregate percentage of total, mean, stdev
2118 CPU usage: user, system, context switches, major faults, minor faults
2119 IO depths: <=1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, >=64
2120 IO latencies microseconds: <=2, 4, 10, 20, 50, 100, 250, 500, 750, 1000
2121 IO latencies milliseconds: <=2, 4, 10, 20, 50, 100, 250, 500, 750, 1000, 2000, >=2000
2122 Disk utilization: Disk name, Read ios, write ios,
2123 Read merges, write merges,
2124 Read ticks, write ticks,
2125 Time spent in queue, disk utilization percentage
2126 Additional Info (dependent on continue_on_error, default off): total # errors, first error code
2127
2128 Additional Info (dependent on description being set): Text description
2129
2130Completion latency percentiles can be a grouping of up to 20 sets, so
2131for the terse output fio writes all of them. Each field will look like this:
2132
2133 1.00%=6112
2134
2135which is the Xth percentile, and the usec latency associated with it.
2136
2137For disk utilization, all disks used by fio are shown. So for each disk
2138there will be a disk utilization section.
2139
2140
21418.0 Trace file format
2142---------------------
2143There are two trace file format that you can encounter. The older (v1) format
2144is unsupported since version 1.20-rc3 (March 2008). It will still be described
2145below in case that you get an old trace and want to understand it.
2146
2147In any case the trace is a simple text file with a single action per line.
2148
2149
21508.1 Trace file format v1
2151------------------------
2152Each line represents a single io action in the following format:
2153
2154rw, offset, length
2155
2156where rw=0/1 for read/write, and the offset and length entries being in bytes.
2157
2158This format is not supported in Fio versions => 1.20-rc3.
2159
2160
21618.2 Trace file format v2
2162------------------------
2163The second version of the trace file format was added in Fio version 1.17.
2164It allows to access more then one file per trace and has a bigger set of
2165possible file actions.
2166
2167The first line of the trace file has to be:
2168
2169fio version 2 iolog
2170
2171Following this can be lines in two different formats, which are described below.
2172
2173The file management format:
2174
2175filename action
2176
2177The filename is given as an absolute path. The action can be one of these:
2178
2179add Add the given filename to the trace
2180open Open the file with the given filename. The filename has to have
2181 been added with the add action before.
2182close Close the file with the given filename. The file has to have been
2183 opened before.
2184
2185
2186The file io action format:
2187
2188filename action offset length
2189
2190The filename is given as an absolute path, and has to have been added and opened
2191before it can be used with this format. The offset and length are given in
2192bytes. The action can be one of these:
2193
2194wait Wait for 'offset' microseconds. Everything below 100 is discarded.
2195 The time is relative to the previous wait statement.
2196read Read 'length' bytes beginning from 'offset'
2197write Write 'length' bytes beginning from 'offset'
2198sync fsync() the file
2199datasync fdatasync() the file
2200trim trim the given file from the given 'offset' for 'length' bytes
2201
2202
22039.0 CPU idleness profiling
2204--------------------------
2205In some cases, we want to understand CPU overhead in a test. For example,
2206we test patches for the specific goodness of whether they reduce CPU usage.
2207fio implements a balloon approach to create a thread per CPU that runs at
2208idle priority, meaning that it only runs when nobody else needs the cpu.
2209By measuring the amount of work completed by the thread, idleness of each
2210CPU can be derived accordingly.
2211
2212An unit work is defined as touching a full page of unsigned characters. Mean
2213and standard deviation of time to complete an unit work is reported in "unit
2214work" section. Options can be chosen to report detailed percpu idleness or
2215overall system idleness by aggregating percpu stats.
2216
2217
221810.0 Verification and triggers
2219------------------------------
2220Fio is usually run in one of two ways, when data verification is done. The
2221first is a normal write job of some sort with verify enabled. When the
2222write phase has completed, fio switches to reads and verifies everything
2223it wrote. The second model is running just the write phase, and then later
2224on running the same job (but with reads instead of writes) to repeat the
2225same IO patterns and verify the contents. Both of these methods depend
2226on the write phase being completed, as fio otherwise has no idea how much
2227data was written.
2228
2229With verification triggers, fio supports dumping the current write state
2230to local files. Then a subsequent read verify workload can load this state
2231and know exactly where to stop. This is useful for testing cases where
2232power is cut to a server in a managed fashion, for instance.
2233
2234A verification trigger consists of two things:
2235
22361) Storing the write state of each job
22372) Executing a trigger command
2238
2239The write state is relatively small, on the order of hundreds of bytes
2240to single kilobytes. It contains information on the number of completions
2241done, the last X completions, etc.
2242
2243A trigger is invoked either through creation ('touch') of a specified
2244file in the system, or through a timeout setting. If fio is run with
2245--trigger-file=/tmp/trigger-file, then it will continually check for
2246the existence of /tmp/trigger-file. When it sees this file, it will
2247fire off the trigger (thus saving state, and executing the trigger
2248command).
2249
2250For client/server runs, there's both a local and remote trigger. If
2251fio is running as a server backend, it will send the job states back
2252to the client for safe storage, then execute the remote trigger, if
2253specified. If a local trigger is specified, the server will still send
2254back the write state, but the client will then execute the trigger.
2255
225610.1 Verification trigger example
2257---------------------------------
2258Lets say we want to run a powercut test on the remote machine 'server'.
2259Our write workload is in write-test.fio. We want to cut power to 'server'
2260at some point during the run, and we'll run this test from the safety
2261or our local machine, 'localbox'. On the server, we'll start the fio
2262backend normally:
2263
2264server# fio --server
2265
2266and on the client, we'll fire off the workload:
2267
2268localbox$ fio --client=server --trigger-file=/tmp/my-trigger --trigger-remote="bash -c \"echo b > /proc/sysrq-triger\""
2269
2270We set /tmp/my-trigger as the trigger file, and we tell fio to execute
2271
2272echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
2273
2274on the server once it has received the trigger and sent us the write
2275state. This will work, but it's not _really_ cutting power to the server,
2276it's merely abruptly rebooting it. If we have a remote way of cutting
2277power to the server through IPMI or similar, we could do that through
2278a local trigger command instead. Lets assume we have a script that does
2279IPMI reboot of a given hostname, ipmi-reboot. On localbox, we could
2280then have run fio with a local trigger instead:
2281
2282localbox$ fio --client=server --trigger-file=/tmp/my-trigger --trigger="ipmi-reboot server"
2283
2284For this case, fio would wait for the server to send us the write state,
2285then execute 'ipmi-reboot server' when that happened.
2286
228710.2 Loading verify state
2288-------------------------
2289To load store write state, read verification job file must contain
2290the verify_state_load option. If that is set, fio will load the previously
2291stored state. For a local fio run this is done by loading the files directly,
2292and on a client/server run, the server backend will ask the client to send
2293the files over and load them from there.
2294
2295
229611.0 Log File Formats
2297---------------------
2298
2299Fio supports a variety of log file formats, for logging latencies, bandwidth,
2300and IOPS. The logs share a common format, which looks like this:
2301
2302time (msec), value, data direction, offset
2303
2304Time for the log entry is always in milliseconds. The value logged depends
2305on the type of log, it will be one of the following:
2306
2307 Latency log Value is latency in usecs
2308 Bandwidth log Value is in KB/sec
2309 IOPS log Value is IOPS
2310
2311Data direction is one of the following:
2312
2313 0 IO is a READ
2314 1 IO is a WRITE
2315 2 IO is a TRIM
2316
2317The offset is the offset, in bytes, from the start of the file, for that
2318particular IO. The logging of the offset can be toggled with 'log_offset'.
2319
2320If windowed logging is enabled though 'log_avg_msec', then fio doesn't log
2321individual IOs. Instead of logs the average values over the specified
2322period of time. Since 'data direction' and 'offset' are per-IO values,
2323they aren't applicable if windowed logging is enabled. If windowed logging
2324is enabled and 'log_max_value' is set, then fio logs maximum values in
2325that window instead of averages.
2326