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, Fedora, CentOS & Co:
103 Starting with Fedora 9/Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 4, fio
104 packages are part of the Fedora/EPEL repositories.
105 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/rpms/fio/ .
108 Mandriva has integrated fio into their package repository, so installing
109 on that distro should be as easy as typing ``urpmi fio``.
112 Packages for Solaris are available from OpenCSW. Install their pkgutil
113 tool (http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/) and then install fio via
117 Rebecca Cran <rebecca+fio@bluestop.org> has fio packages for Windows at
118 http://www.bluestop.org/fio/ .
121 Packages for BSDs may be available from their binary package repositories.
122 Look for a package "fio" using their binary package managers.
134 Note that GNU make is required. On BSDs it's available from devel/gmake within
135 ports directory; on Solaris it's in the SUNWgmake package. On platforms where
136 GNU make isn't the default, type ``gmake`` instead of ``make``.
138 Configure will print the enabled options. Note that on Linux based platforms,
139 the libaio development packages must be installed to use the libaio
140 engine. Depending on distro, it is usually called libaio-devel or libaio-dev.
142 For gfio, gtk 2.18 (or newer), associated glib threads, and cairo are required
143 to be installed. gfio isn't built automatically and can be enabled with a
144 ``--enable-gfio`` option to configure.
146 To build fio with a cross-compiler::
149 $ make CROSS_COMPILE=/path/to/toolchain/prefix
151 Configure will attempt to determine the target platform automatically.
153 It's possible to build fio for ESX as well, use the ``--esx`` switch to
160 On Windows, Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) is required in order to build
161 fio. To create an MSI installer package install WiX 3.8 from
162 http://wixtoolset.org and run :file:`dobuild.cmd` from the :file:`os/windows`
165 How to compile fio on 64-bit Windows:
167 1. Install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). Install **make** and all
168 packages starting with **mingw64-i686** and **mingw64-x86_64**.
169 2. Open the Cygwin Terminal.
170 3. Go to the fio directory (source files).
171 4. Run ``make clean && make -j``.
173 To build fio on 32-bit Windows, run ``./configure --build-32bit-win`` before
176 It's recommended that once built or installed, fio be run in a Command Prompt or
177 other 'native' console such as console2, since there are known to be display and
178 signal issues when running it under a Cygwin shell (see
179 http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=56 for details).
185 Fio uses Sphinx_ to generate documentation from the reStructuredText_ files.
186 To build HTML formatted documentation run ``make -C doc html`` and direct your
187 browser to :file:`./doc/output/html/index.html`. To build manual page run
188 ``make -C doc man`` and then ``man doc/output/man/fio.1``. To see what other
189 output formats are supported run ``make -C doc help``.
191 .. _reStructuredText: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/rest.html
192 .. _Sphinx: http://www.sphinx-doc.org
198 Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSX, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
199 Windows, FreeBSD, and DragonFly. Some features and/or options may only be
200 available on some of the platforms, typically because those features only apply
201 to that platform (like the solarisaio engine, or the splice engine on Linux).
203 Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be
204 implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is disk
205 utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that does exist
208 Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and FreeBSD does not
209 support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, only threads are
210 supported on FreeBSD. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or
211 other locking alternatives.
213 Other \*BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out of the
214 box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms, your
215 mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly
216 appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool
217 available on all platforms.
219 Note that POSIX aio is not enabled by default on AIX. Messages like these::
221 Symbol resolution failed for /usr/lib/libc.a(posix_aio.o) because:
222 Symbol _posix_kaio_rdwr (number 2) is not exported from dependent module /unix.
224 indicate one needs to enable POSIX aio. Run the following commands as root::
226 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
227 posix_aio0 Defined Posix Asynchronous I/O
228 # cfgmgr -l posix_aio0
229 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
230 posix_aio0 Available Posix Asynchronous I/O
232 POSIX aio should work now. To make the change permanent::
234 # chdev -l posix_aio0 -P -a autoconfig='available'
241 Running fio is normally the easiest part - you just give it the job file
242 (or job files) as parameters::
244 $ fio [options] [jobfile] ...
246 and it will start doing what the *jobfile* tells it to do. You can give more
247 than one job file on the command line, fio will serialize the running of those
248 files. Internally that is the same as using the :option:`stonewall` parameter
249 described in the parameter section.
251 If the job file contains only one job, you may as well just give the parameters
252 on the command line. The command line parameters are identical to the job
253 parameters, with a few extra that control global parameters. For example, for
254 the job file parameter :option:`iodepth=2 <iodepth>`, the mirror command line
255 option would be :option:`--iodepth 2 <iodepth>` or :option:`--iodepth=2
256 <iodepth>`. You can also use the command line for giving more than one job
257 entry. For each :option:`--name <name>` option that fio sees, it will start a
258 new job with that name. Command line entries following a
259 :option:`--name <name>` entry will apply to that job, until there are no more
260 entries or a new :option:`--name <name>` entry is seen. This is similar to the
261 job file options, where each option applies to the current job until a new []
264 fio does not need to run as root, except if the files or devices specified in
265 the job section requires that. Some other options may also be restricted, such
266 as memory locking, I/O scheduler switching, and decreasing the nice value.
268 If *jobfile* is specified as ``-``, the job file will be read from standard