4 fio is a tool that will spawn a number of threads or processes doing a
5 particular type of io action as specified by the user. fio takes a
6 number of global parameters, each inherited by the thread unless
7 otherwise parameters given to them overriding that setting is given.
8 The typical use of fio is to write a job file matching the io load
15 fio resides in a git repo, the canonical place is:
17 git://git.kernel.dk/fio.git
19 If you are inside a corporate firewall, git:// may not always work for
20 you. In that case you can use the http protocol, path is the same:
22 http://git.kernel.dk/fio.git
24 Snapshots are frequently generated and they include the git meta data as
25 well. You can download them here:
27 http://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/
34 Starting with Debian "Squeeze", fio packages are part of the official
35 Debian repository. http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fio
38 Starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka "Lucid Lynx"), fio packages are part
39 of the Ubuntu "universe" repository.
40 http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=fio
43 Dag Wieƫrs has RPMs for Red Hat related distros, find them here:
44 http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/fio/
47 Mandriva has integrated fio into their package repository, so installing
48 on that distro should be as easy as typing 'urpmi fio'.
51 Packages for Solaris are available from OpenCSW. Install their pkgutil
52 tool (http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/) and then install fio via
56 Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> has fio packages for Windows at
57 http://www.bluestop.org/fio/ .
63 There's a mailing list associated with fio. It's meant for general
64 discussion, bug reporting, questions, and development - basically anything
65 that has to do with fio. An automated mail detailing recent commits is
66 automatically sent to the list at most daily. The list address is
67 fio@vger.kernel.org, subscribe by sending an email to
68 majordomo@vger.kernel.org with
72 in the body of the email. Archives can be found here:
74 http://www.spinics.net/lists/fio/
76 and archives for the old list can be found here:
78 http://maillist.kernel.dk/fio-devel/
84 Just type 'configure', 'make' and 'make install'.
86 Note that GNU make is required. On BSD it's available from devel/gmake;
87 on Solaris it's in the SUNWgmake package. On platforms where GNU make
88 isn't the default, type 'gmake' instead of 'make'.
90 Configure will print the enabled options. Note that on Linux based
91 platforms, you'll need to have the libaio development packages
92 installed to use the libaio engine. Depending on distro, it is
93 usually called libaio-devel or libaio-dev.
95 For gfio, you need gtk 2.18 or newer and associated glib threads
96 and cairo. gfio isn't built automatically, it needs to be enabled
97 with a --enable-gfio option to configure.
99 To build FIO with a cross-compiler:
101 $ make CROSS_COMPILE=/path/to/toolchain/prefix
102 Configure will attempt to determine the target platform automatically.
108 On Windows Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) is required in order to
109 build fio. To create an MSI installer package install WiX 3.7 from
110 http://wixtoolset.org and run dobuild.cmd from the
111 os/windows directory.
113 How to compile FIO on 64-bit Windows:
115 1. Install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe). Install 'make' and all
116 packages starting with 'mingw64-i686' and 'mingw64-x86_64'.
117 2. Download ftp://sourceware.org/pub/pthreads-win32/prebuilt-dll-2-9-1-release/dll/x64/pthreadGC2.dll
118 and copy to the fio source directory.
119 3. Open the Cygwin Terminal.
120 4. Go to the fio directory (source files).
124 To build fio on 32-bit Windows, download x86/pthreadGC2.dll instead and do
125 './configure --build-32bit-win=yes' before 'make'.
127 It's recommended that once built or installed, fio be run in a Command Prompt
128 or other 'native' console such as console2, since there are known to be display
129 and signal issues when running it under a Cygwin shell
130 (see http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=56 for details).
137 --debug Enable some debugging options (see below)
138 --parse-only Parse options only, don't start any IO
139 --output Write output to file
140 --runtime Runtime in seconds
141 --latency-log Generate per-job latency logs
142 --bandwidth-log Generate per-job bandwidth logs
143 --minimal Minimal (terse) output
144 --output-format=type Output format (terse,json,normal)
145 --terse-version=type Terse version output format (default 3, or 2 or 4).
146 --version Print version info and exit
147 --help Print this page
148 --cpuclock-test Perform test/validation of CPU clock
149 --cmdhelp=cmd Print command help, "all" for all of them
150 --enghelp=engine Print ioengine help, or list available ioengines
151 --enghelp=engine,cmd Print help for an ioengine cmd
152 --showcmd Turn a job file into command line options
153 --readonly Turn on safety read-only checks, preventing
155 --eta=when When ETA estimate should be printed
156 May be "always", "never" or "auto"
157 --eta-newline=time Force a new line for every 'time' period passed
158 --status-interval=t Force full status dump every 't' period passed
159 --section=name Only run specified section in job file.
160 Multiple sections can be specified.
161 --alloc-size=kb Set smalloc pool to this size in kb (def 1024)
162 --warnings-fatal Fio parser warnings are fatal
163 --max-jobs Maximum number of threads/processes to support
164 --server=args Start backend server. See Client/Server section.
165 --client=host Connect to specified backend.
166 --idle-prof=option Report cpu idleness on a system or percpu basis
167 (option=system,percpu) or run unit work
168 calibration only (option=calibrate).
171 Any parameters following the options will be assumed to be job files,
172 unless they match a job file parameter. You can add as many as you want,
173 each job file will be regarded as a separate group and fio will stonewall
176 The --readonly switch is an extra safety guard to prevent accidentally
177 turning on a write setting when that is not desired. Fio will only write
178 if rw=write/randwrite/rw/randrw is given, but this extra safety net can
179 be used as an extra precaution. It will also enable a write check in the
180 io engine core to prevent an accidental write due to a fio bug.
182 The debug switch allows adding options that trigger certain logging
183 options in fio. Currently the options are:
185 process Dump info related to processes
186 file Dump info related to file actions
187 io Dump info related to IO queuing
188 mem Dump info related to memory allocations
189 blktrace Dump info related to blktrace setup
190 verify Dump info related to IO verification
191 all Enable all debug options
192 random Dump info related to random offset generation
193 parse Dump info related to option matching and parsing
194 diskutil Dump info related to disk utilization updates
195 job:x Dump info only related to job number x
196 mutex Dump info only related to mutex up/down ops
197 profile Dump info related to profile extensions
198 time Dump info related to internal time keeping
199 ? or help Show available debug options.
201 You can specify as many as you want, eg --debug=file,mem will enable
202 file and memory debugging.
204 The section switch is meant to make it easier to ship a bigger job file
205 instead of several smaller ones. Say you define a job file with light,
206 moderate, and heavy parts. Then you can ask fio to run the given part
207 only by giving it a --section=heavy command line option. The section
208 option only applies to job sections, the reserved 'global' section is
209 always parsed and taken into account.
211 Fio has an internal allocator for shared memory called smalloc. It
212 allocates shared structures from this pool. The pool defaults to 1024k
213 in size, and can grow to 128 pools. If running large jobs with randommap
214 enabled it can run out of memory, in which case the --alloc-size switch
215 is handy for starting with a larger pool size. The backing store is
216 files in /tmp. Fio cleans up after itself, while it is running you
217 may see .fio_smalloc.* files in /tmp.
223 See the HOWTO file for a more detailed description of parameters and what
224 they mean. This file contains the terse version. You can describe big and
225 complex setups with the command line, but generally it's a lot easier to
226 just write a simple job file to describe the workload. The job file format
227 is in the ini style format, as that is easy to read and write for the user.
229 The HOWTO or man page has a full list of all options, along with
230 descriptions, etc. The --cmdhelp option also lists all options. If
231 used with an option argument, it will detail that particular option.
237 Normally you would run fio as a stand-alone application on the machine
238 where the IO workload should be generated. However, it is also possible to
239 run the frontend and backend of fio separately. This makes it possible to
240 have a fio server running on the machine(s) where the IO workload should
241 be running, while controlling it from another machine.
243 To start the server, you would do:
247 on that machine, where args defines what fio listens to. The arguments
248 are of the form 'type,hostname or IP,port'. 'type' is either 'ip' (or ip4)
249 for TCP/IP v4, 'ip6' for TCP/IP v6, or 'sock' for a local unix domain socket.
250 'hostname' is either a hostname or IP address, and 'port' is the port to
251 listen to (only valid for TCP/IP, not a local socket). Some examples:
255 Start a fio server, listening on all interfaces on the default port (8765).
257 2) fio --server=ip:hostname,4444
259 Start a fio server, listening on IP belonging to hostname and on port 4444.
261 3) fio --server=ip6:::1,4444
263 Start a fio server, listening on IPv6 localhost ::1 and on port 4444.
265 4) fio --server=,4444
267 Start a fio server, listening on all interfaces on port 4444.
269 5) fio --server=1.2.3.4
271 Start a fio server, listening on IP 1.2.3.4 on the default port.
273 6) fio --server=sock:/tmp/fio.sock
275 Start a fio server, listening on the local socket /tmp/fio.sock.
277 When a server is running, you can connect to it from a client. The client
280 fio --local-args --client=server --remote-args <job file(s)>
282 where --local-args are arguments that are local to the client where it is
283 running, 'server' is the connect string, and --remote-args and <job file(s)>
284 are sent to the server. The 'server' string follows the same format as it
285 does on the server side, to allow IP/hostname/socket and port strings.
286 You can connect to multiple clients as well, to do that you could run:
288 fio --client=server2 <job file(s)> --client=server2 <job file(s)>
294 Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSX, NetBSD, Windows
295 and FreeBSD. Some features and/or options may only be available on some of
296 the platforms, typically because those features only apply to that platform
297 (like the solarisaio engine, or the splice engine on Linux).
299 Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be
300 implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is
301 disk utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that
302 does exist in FreeBSD/Solaris.
304 Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and FreeBSD does not
305 support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, only threads are
306 supported on FreeBSD. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or
307 other locking alternatives.
309 Other *BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out
310 of the box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms,
311 your mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly
312 appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool
313 available on all platforms.
315 Note that POSIX aio is not enabled by default on AIX. If you get messages like:
317 Symbol resolution failed for /usr/lib/libc.a(posix_aio.o) because:
318 Symbol _posix_kaio_rdwr (number 2) is not exported from dependent module /unix.
320 you need to enable POSIX aio. Run the following commands as root:
322 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
323 posix_aio0 Defined Posix Asynchronous I/O
324 # cfgmgr -l posix_aio0
325 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
326 posix_aio0 Available Posix Asynchronous I/O
328 POSIX aio should work now. To make the change permanent:
330 # chdev -l posix_aio0 -P -a autoconfig='available'
337 Fio was written by Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> to enable flexible testing
338 of the Linux IO subsystem and schedulers. He got tired of writing
339 specific test applications to simulate a given workload, and found that
340 the existing io benchmark/test tools out there weren't flexible enough
341 to do what he wanted.
343 Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> 20060905