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.
64 An automated mail detailing recent commits is automatically sent to the list at
65 most daily. The list address is fio@vger.kernel.org, subscribe by sending an
66 email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org with
70 in the body of the email. Archives can be found here:
72 http://www.spinics.net/lists/fio/
74 and archives for the old list can be found here:
76 http://maillist.kernel.dk/fio-devel/
82 Fio was written by Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> to enable flexible testing of
83 the Linux I/O subsystem and schedulers. He got tired of writing specific test
84 applications to simulate a given workload, and found that the existing I/O
85 benchmark/test tools out there weren't flexible enough to do what he wanted.
87 Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> 20060905
94 Starting with Debian "Squeeze", fio packages are part of the official
95 Debian repository. http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fio.
98 Starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka "Lucid Lynx"), fio packages are part
99 of the Ubuntu "universe" repository.
100 http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=fio.
102 Red Hat, CentOS & Co:
103 Dag Wieƫrs has RPMs for Red Hat related distros, find them here:
104 http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/fio/.
107 Mandriva has integrated fio into their package repository, so installing
108 on that distro should be as easy as typing ``urpmi fio``.
111 Packages for Solaris are available from OpenCSW. Install their pkgutil
112 tool (http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/) and then install fio via
116 Rebecca Cran <rebecca+fio@bluestop.org> has fio packages for Windows at
117 http://www.bluestop.org/fio/ .
120 Packages for BSDs may be available from their binary package repositories.
121 Look for a package "fio" using their binary package managers.
133 Note that GNU make is required. On BSDs it's available from devel/gmake within
134 ports directory; on Solaris it's in the SUNWgmake package. On platforms where
135 GNU make isn't the default, type ``gmake`` instead of ``make``.
137 Configure will print the enabled options. Note that on Linux based platforms,
138 the libaio development packages must be installed to use the libaio
139 engine. Depending on distro, it is usually called libaio-devel or libaio-dev.
141 For gfio, gtk 2.18 (or newer), associated glib threads, and cairo are required
142 to be installed. gfio isn't built automatically and can be enabled with a
143 ``--enable-gfio`` option to configure.
145 To build fio with a cross-compiler::
148 $ make CROSS_COMPILE=/path/to/toolchain/prefix
150 Configure will attempt to determine the target platform automatically.
152 It's possible to build fio for ESX as well, use the ``--esx`` switch to
159 On Windows, Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) is required in order to build
160 fio. To create an MSI installer package install WiX 3.8 from
161 http://wixtoolset.org and run :file:`dobuild.cmd` from the :file:`os/windows`
164 How to compile fio on 64-bit Windows:
166 1. Install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). Install **make** and all
167 packages starting with **mingw64-i686** and **mingw64-x86_64**.
168 2. Open the Cygwin Terminal.
169 3. Go to the fio directory (source files).
170 4. Run ``make clean && make -j``.
172 To build fio on 32-bit Windows, run ``./configure --build-32bit-win`` before
175 It's recommended that once built or installed, fio be run in a Command Prompt or
176 other 'native' console such as console2, since there are known to be display and
177 signal issues when running it under a Cygwin shell (see
178 http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=56 for details).
184 Fio uses Sphinx_ to generate documentation from the reStructuredText_ files.
185 To build HTML formatted documentation run ``make -C doc html`` and direct your
186 browser to :file:`./doc/output/html/index.html`. To build manual page run
187 ``make -C doc man`` and then ``man doc/output/man/fio.1``. To see what other
188 output formats are supported run ``make -C doc help``.
190 .. _reStructuredText: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/rest.html
191 .. _Sphinx: http://www.sphinx-doc.org
197 Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSX, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
198 Windows, FreeBSD, and DragonFly. Some features and/or options may only be
199 available on some of the platforms, typically because those features only apply
200 to that platform (like the solarisaio engine, or the splice engine on Linux).
202 Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be
203 implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is disk
204 utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that does exist
207 Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and FreeBSD does not
208 support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, only threads are
209 supported on FreeBSD. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or
210 other locking alternatives.
212 Other \*BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out of the
213 box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms, your
214 mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly
215 appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool
216 available on all platforms.
218 Note that POSIX aio is not enabled by default on AIX. Messages like these::
220 Symbol resolution failed for /usr/lib/libc.a(posix_aio.o) because:
221 Symbol _posix_kaio_rdwr (number 2) is not exported from dependent module /unix.
223 indicate one needs to enable POSIX aio. Run the following commands as root::
225 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
226 posix_aio0 Defined Posix Asynchronous I/O
227 # cfgmgr -l posix_aio0
228 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
229 posix_aio0 Available Posix Asynchronous I/O
231 POSIX aio should work now. To make the change permanent::
233 # chdev -l posix_aio0 -P -a autoconfig='available'
240 Running fio is normally the easiest part - you just give it the job file
241 (or job files) as parameters::
243 $ fio [options] [jobfile] ...
245 and it will start doing what the *jobfile* tells it to do. You can give more
246 than one job file on the command line, fio will serialize the running of those
247 files. Internally that is the same as using the :option:`stonewall` parameter
248 described in the parameter section.
250 If the job file contains only one job, you may as well just give the parameters
251 on the command line. The command line parameters are identical to the job
252 parameters, with a few extra that control global parameters. For example, for
253 the job file parameter :option:`iodepth=2 <iodepth>`, the mirror command line
254 option would be :option:`--iodepth 2 <iodepth>` or :option:`--iodepth=2
255 <iodepth>`. You can also use the command line for giving more than one job
256 entry. For each :option:`--name <name>` option that fio sees, it will start a
257 new job with that name. Command line entries following a
258 :option:`--name <name>` entry will apply to that job, until there are no more
259 entries or a new :option:`--name <name>` entry is seen. This is similar to the
260 job file options, where each option applies to the current job until a new []
263 fio does not need to run as root, except if the files or devices specified in
264 the job section requires that. Some other options may also be restricted, such
265 as memory locking, I/O scheduler switching, and decreasing the nice value.
267 If *jobfile* is specified as ``-``, the job file will be read from standard