4 Fio was originally written to save me the hassle of writing special test case
5 programs when I wanted to test a specific workload, either for performance
6 reasons or to find/reproduce a bug. The process of writing such a test app can
7 be tiresome, especially if you have to do it often. Hence I needed a tool that
8 would be able to simulate a given I/O workload without resorting to writing a
9 tailored test case again and again.
11 A test work load is difficult to define, though. There can be any number of
12 processes or threads involved, and they can each be using their own way of
13 generating I/O. You could have someone dirtying large amounts of memory in an
14 memory mapped file, or maybe several threads issuing reads using asynchronous
15 I/O. fio needed to be flexible enough to simulate both of these cases, and many
18 Fio spawns a number of threads or processes doing a particular type of I/O
19 action as specified by the user. fio takes a number of global parameters, each
20 inherited by the thread unless otherwise parameters given to them overriding
21 that setting is given. The typical use of fio is to write a job file matching
22 the I/O load one wants to simulate.
28 Fio resides in a git repo, the canonical place is:
30 git://git.kernel.dk/fio.git
32 When inside a corporate firewall, git:// URL sometimes does not work.
33 If git:// does not work, use the http protocol instead:
35 http://git.kernel.dk/fio.git
37 Snapshots are frequently generated and :file:`fio-git-*.tar.gz` include the git
38 meta data as well. Other tarballs are archives of official fio releases.
39 Snapshots can download from:
41 http://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/
43 There are also two official mirrors. Both of these are automatically synced with
44 the main repository, when changes are pushed. If the main repo is down for some
45 reason, either one of these is safe to use as a backup:
47 git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/axboe/fio.git
49 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/axboe/fio.git
53 git://github.com/axboe/fio.git
55 https://github.com/axboe/fio.git
61 The fio project mailing list is meant for anything related to fio including
62 general discussion, bug reporting, questions, and development. For bug reporting,
65 An automated mail detailing recent commits is automatically sent to the list at
66 most daily. The list address is fio@vger.kernel.org, subscribe by sending an
67 email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org with
71 in the body of the email. Archives can be found here:
73 http://www.spinics.net/lists/fio/
75 and archives for the old list can be found here:
77 http://maillist.kernel.dk/fio-devel/
83 Fio was written by Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> to enable flexible testing of
84 the Linux I/O subsystem and schedulers. He got tired of writing specific test
85 applications to simulate a given workload, and found that the existing I/O
86 benchmark/test tools out there weren't flexible enough to do what he wanted.
88 Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> 20060905
95 Starting with Debian "Squeeze", fio packages are part of the official
96 Debian repository. http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fio .
99 Starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka "Lucid Lynx"), fio packages are part
100 of the Ubuntu "universe" repository.
101 http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=fio .
103 Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS & Co:
104 Starting with Fedora 9/Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 4, fio
105 packages are part of the Fedora/EPEL repositories.
106 https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/fio .
109 Mandriva has integrated fio into their package repository, so installing
110 on that distro should be as easy as typing ``urpmi fio``.
113 An Arch Linux package is provided under the Community sub-repository:
114 https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=fio
117 Packages for Solaris are available from OpenCSW. Install their pkgutil
118 tool (http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/) and then install fio via
122 Rebecca Cran <rebecca@bsdio.com> has fio packages for Windows at
123 https://bsdio.com/fio/ . The latest builds for Windows can also
124 be grabbed from https://ci.appveyor.com/project/axboe/fio by clicking
125 the latest x86 or x64 build, then selecting the ARTIFACTS tab.
128 Packages for BSDs may be available from their binary package repositories.
129 Look for a package "fio" using their binary package managers.
141 Note that GNU make is required. On BSDs it's available from devel/gmake within
142 ports directory; on Solaris it's in the SUNWgmake package. On platforms where
143 GNU make isn't the default, type ``gmake`` instead of ``make``.
145 Configure will print the enabled options. Note that on Linux based platforms,
146 the libaio development packages must be installed to use the libaio
147 engine. Depending on distro, it is usually called libaio-devel or libaio-dev.
149 For gfio, gtk 2.18 (or newer), associated glib threads, and cairo are required
150 to be installed. gfio isn't built automatically and can be enabled with a
151 ``--enable-gfio`` option to configure.
153 To build fio with a cross-compiler::
156 $ make CROSS_COMPILE=/path/to/toolchain/prefix
158 Configure will attempt to determine the target platform automatically.
160 It's possible to build fio for ESX as well, use the ``--esx`` switch to
167 The minimum versions of Windows for building/runing fio are Windows 7/Windows
168 Server 2008 R2. On Windows, Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/) is required in
169 order to build fio. To create an MSI installer package install WiX from
170 https://wixtoolset.org and run :file:`dobuild.cmd` from the :file:`os/windows`
173 How to compile fio on 64-bit Windows:
175 1. Install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). Install **make** and all
176 packages starting with **mingw64-x86_64**. Ensure
177 **mingw64-x86_64-zlib** are installed if you wish
178 to enable fio's log compression functionality.
179 2. Open the Cygwin Terminal.
180 3. Go to the fio directory (source files).
181 4. Run ``make clean && make -j``.
183 To build fio for 32-bit Windows, ensure the -i686 versions of the previously
184 mentioned -x86_64 packages are installed and run ``./configure
185 --build-32bit-win`` before ``make``.
187 It's recommended that once built or installed, fio be run in a Command Prompt or
188 other 'native' console such as console2, since there are known to be display and
189 signal issues when running it under a Cygwin shell (see
190 https://github.com/mintty/mintty/issues/56 and
191 https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/Tips#inputoutput-interaction-with-alien-programs
198 Fio uses Sphinx_ to generate documentation from the reStructuredText_ files.
199 To build HTML formatted documentation run ``make -C doc html`` and direct your
200 browser to :file:`./doc/output/html/index.html`. To build manual page run
201 ``make -C doc man`` and then ``man doc/output/man/fio.1``. To see what other
202 output formats are supported run ``make -C doc help``.
204 .. _reStructuredText: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/rest.html
205 .. _Sphinx: http://www.sphinx-doc.org
211 Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSX, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
212 Windows, FreeBSD, and DragonFly. Some features and/or options may only be
213 available on some of the platforms, typically because those features only apply
214 to that platform (like the solarisaio engine, or the splice engine on Linux).
216 Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be
217 implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is disk
218 utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that does exist
221 Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and some platforms do not
222 support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, on such platforms only
223 threads are supported. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or other
224 locking alternatives.
226 Other \*BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out of the
227 box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms, your
228 mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly
229 appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool
230 available on all platforms.
232 Note that POSIX aio is not enabled by default on AIX. Messages like these::
234 Symbol resolution failed for /usr/lib/libc.a(posix_aio.o) because:
235 Symbol _posix_kaio_rdwr (number 2) is not exported from dependent module /unix.
237 indicate one needs to enable POSIX aio. Run the following commands as root::
239 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
240 posix_aio0 Defined Posix Asynchronous I/O
241 # cfgmgr -l posix_aio0
242 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
243 posix_aio0 Available Posix Asynchronous I/O
245 POSIX aio should work now. To make the change permanent::
247 # chdev -l posix_aio0 -P -a autoconfig='available'
254 Running fio is normally the easiest part - you just give it the job file
255 (or job files) as parameters::
257 $ fio [options] [jobfile] ...
259 and it will start doing what the *jobfile* tells it to do. You can give more
260 than one job file on the command line, fio will serialize the running of those
261 files. Internally that is the same as using the :option:`stonewall` parameter
262 described in the parameter section.
264 If the job file contains only one job, you may as well just give the parameters
265 on the command line. The command line parameters are identical to the job
266 parameters, with a few extra that control global parameters. For example, for
267 the job file parameter :option:`iodepth=2 <iodepth>`, the mirror command line
268 option would be :option:`--iodepth 2 <iodepth>` or :option:`--iodepth=2
269 <iodepth>`. You can also use the command line for giving more than one job
270 entry. For each :option:`--name <name>` option that fio sees, it will start a
271 new job with that name. Command line entries following a
272 :option:`--name <name>` entry will apply to that job, until there are no more
273 entries or a new :option:`--name <name>` entry is seen. This is similar to the
274 job file options, where each option applies to the current job until a new []
277 fio does not need to run as root, except if the files or devices specified in
278 the job section requires that. Some other options may also be restricted, such
279 as memory locking, I/O scheduler switching, and decreasing the nice value.
281 If *jobfile* is specified as ``-``, the job file will be read from standard