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 a
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 https://git.kernel.dk/cgit/fio/
32 Snapshots are frequently generated and :file:`fio-git-*.tar.gz` include the git
33 meta data as well. Other tarballs are archives of official fio releases.
34 Snapshots can download from:
36 https://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/
38 There are also two official mirrors. Both of these are automatically synced with
39 the main repository, when changes are pushed. If the main repo is down for some
40 reason, either one of these is safe to use as a backup:
42 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/axboe/fio.git
44 https://github.com/axboe/fio.git
50 The fio project mailing list is meant for anything related to fio including
51 general discussion, bug reporting, questions, and development. For bug reporting,
54 An automated mail detailing recent commits is automatically sent to the list at
55 most daily. The list address is fio@vger.kernel.org, subscribe by sending an
56 email to majordomo@vger.kernel.org with
60 in the body of the email. Archives can be found here:
62 https://www.spinics.net/lists/fio/
66 https://lore.kernel.org/fio/
68 and archives for the old list can be found here:
70 http://maillist.kernel.dk/fio-devel/
76 Fio was written by Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> to enable flexible testing of
77 the Linux I/O subsystem and schedulers. He got tired of writing specific test
78 applications to simulate a given workload, and found that the existing I/O
79 benchmark/test tools out there weren't flexible enough to do what he wanted.
81 Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> 20060905
88 Starting with Debian "Squeeze", fio packages are part of the official
89 Debian repository. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fio .
92 Starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka "Lucid Lynx"), fio packages are part
93 of the Ubuntu "universe" repository.
94 https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=fio .
96 Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS & Co:
97 Starting with Fedora 9/Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 4, fio
98 packages are part of the Fedora/EPEL repositories.
99 https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/fio/ .
102 Mandriva has integrated fio into their package repository, so installing
103 on that distro should be as easy as typing ``urpmi fio``.
106 An Arch Linux package is provided under the Community sub-repository:
107 https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=fio
110 Packages for Solaris are available from OpenCSW. Install their pkgutil
111 tool (http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/) and then install fio via
115 Rebecca Cran <rebecca@bsdio.com> has fio packages for Windows at
116 https://bsdio.com/fio/ . The latest builds for Windows can also
117 be grabbed from https://ci.appveyor.com/project/axboe/fio by clicking
118 the latest x86 or x64 build, then selecting the ARTIFACTS tab.
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 The minimum versions of Windows for building/runing fio are Windows 7/Windows
161 Server 2008 R2. On Windows, Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/) is required in
162 order to build fio. To create an MSI installer package install WiX from
163 https://wixtoolset.org and run :file:`dobuild.cmd` from the :file:`os/windows`
166 How to compile fio on 64-bit Windows:
168 1. Install Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/). Install **make** and all
169 packages starting with **mingw64-x86_64**. Ensure
170 **mingw64-x86_64-zlib** are installed if you wish
171 to enable fio's log compression functionality.
172 2. Open the Cygwin Terminal.
173 3. Go to the fio directory (source files).
174 4. Run ``make clean && make -j``.
176 To build fio for 32-bit Windows, ensure the -i686 versions of the previously
177 mentioned -x86_64 packages are installed and run ``./configure
178 --build-32bit-win`` before ``make``.
180 It's recommended that once built or installed, fio be run in a Command Prompt or
181 other 'native' console such as console2, since there are known to be display and
182 signal issues when running it under a Cygwin shell (see
183 https://github.com/mintty/mintty/issues/56 and
184 https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/Tips#inputoutput-interaction-with-alien-programs
191 Fio uses Sphinx_ to generate documentation from the reStructuredText_ files.
192 To build HTML formatted documentation run ``make -C doc html`` and direct your
193 browser to :file:`./doc/output/html/index.html`. To build manual page run
194 ``make -C doc man`` and then ``man doc/output/man/fio.1``. To see what other
195 output formats are supported run ``make -C doc help``.
197 .. _reStructuredText: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/rest.html
198 .. _Sphinx: https://www.sphinx-doc.org
204 Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSX, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
205 Windows, FreeBSD, and DragonFly. Some features and/or options may only be
206 available on some of the platforms, typically because those features only apply
207 to that platform (like the solarisaio engine, or the splice engine on Linux).
209 Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be
210 implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is disk
211 utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that does exist
214 Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and some platforms do not
215 support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, on such platforms only
216 threads are supported. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or other
217 locking alternatives.
219 Other \*BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out of the
220 box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms, your
221 mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly
222 appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool
223 available on all platforms.
225 Note that POSIX aio is not enabled by default on AIX. Messages like these::
227 Symbol resolution failed for /usr/lib/libc.a(posix_aio.o) because:
228 Symbol _posix_kaio_rdwr (number 2) is not exported from dependent module /unix.
230 indicate one needs to enable POSIX aio. Run the following commands as root::
232 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
233 posix_aio0 Defined Posix Asynchronous I/O
234 # cfgmgr -l posix_aio0
235 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
236 posix_aio0 Available Posix Asynchronous I/O
238 POSIX aio should work now. To make the change permanent::
240 # chdev -l posix_aio0 -P -a autoconfig='available'
247 Running fio is normally the easiest part - you just give it the job file
248 (or job files) as parameters::
250 $ fio [options] [jobfile] ...
252 and it will start doing what the *jobfile* tells it to do. You can give more
253 than one job file on the command line, fio will serialize the running of those
254 files. Internally that is the same as using the :option:`stonewall` parameter
255 described in the parameter section.
257 If the job file contains only one job, you may as well just give the parameters
258 on the command line. The command line parameters are identical to the job
259 parameters, with a few extra that control global parameters. For example, for
260 the job file parameter :option:`iodepth=2 <iodepth>`, the mirror command line
261 option would be :option:`--iodepth 2 <iodepth>` or :option:`--iodepth=2
262 <iodepth>`. You can also use the command line for giving more than one job
263 entry. For each :option:`--name <name>` option that fio sees, it will start a
264 new job with that name. Command line entries following a
265 :option:`--name <name>` entry will apply to that job, until there are no more
266 entries or a new :option:`--name <name>` entry is seen. This is similar to the
267 job file options, where each option applies to the current job until a new []
270 fio does not need to run as root, except if the files or devices specified in
271 the job section requires that. Some other options may also be restricted, such
272 as memory locking, I/O scheduler switching, and decreasing the nice value.
274 If *jobfile* is specified as ``-``, the job file will be read from standard