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
87 Fio is maintained by Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk and
88 Vincent Fu <vincentfu@gmail.com> - however, for reporting bugs please use
89 the fio reflector or the GitHub page rather than email any of them
90 directly. By using the public resources, others will be able to learn from
91 the responses too. Chances are also good that other members will be able to
92 help with your inquiry as well.
99 Starting with Debian "Squeeze", fio packages are part of the official
100 Debian repository. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fio .
103 Starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (aka "Lucid Lynx"), fio packages are part
104 of the Ubuntu "universe" repository.
105 https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=fio .
107 Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS & Co:
108 Starting with Fedora 9/Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 4, fio
109 packages are part of the Fedora/EPEL repositories.
110 https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/fio/ .
113 Mandriva has integrated fio into their package repository, so installing
114 on that distro should be as easy as typing ``urpmi fio``.
117 An Arch Linux package is provided under the Community sub-repository:
118 https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=fio
121 Packages for Solaris are available from OpenCSW. Install their pkgutil
122 tool (http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/) and then install fio via
126 Rebecca Cran <rebecca@bsdio.com> has fio packages for Windows at
127 https://bsdio.com/fio/ . The latest builds for Windows can also
128 be grabbed from https://ci.appveyor.com/project/axboe/fio by clicking
129 the latest x86 or x64 build, then selecting the ARTIFACTS tab.
132 Packages for BSDs may be available from their binary package repositories.
133 Look for a package "fio" using their binary package managers.
145 Note that GNU make is required. On BSDs it's available from devel/gmake within
146 ports directory; on Solaris it's in the SUNWgmake package. On platforms where
147 GNU make isn't the default, type ``gmake`` instead of ``make``.
149 Configure will print the enabled options. Note that on Linux based platforms,
150 the libaio development packages must be installed to use the libaio
151 engine. Depending on distro, it is usually called libaio-devel or libaio-dev.
153 For gfio, gtk 2.18 (or newer), associated glib threads, and cairo are required
154 to be installed. gfio isn't built automatically and can be enabled with a
155 ``--enable-gfio`` option to configure.
157 To build fio with a cross-compiler::
160 $ make CROSS_COMPILE=/path/to/toolchain/prefix
162 Configure will attempt to determine the target platform automatically.
164 It's possible to build fio for ESX as well, use the ``--esx`` switch to
171 The minimum versions of Windows for building/runing fio are Windows 7/Windows
172 Server 2008 R2. On Windows, Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/) is required in
173 order to build fio. To create an MSI installer package install WiX from
174 https://wixtoolset.org and run :file:`dobuild.cmd` from the :file:`os/windows`
177 How to compile fio on 64-bit Windows:
179 1. Install Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/). Install **make** and all
180 packages starting with **mingw64-x86_64**. Ensure
181 **mingw64-x86_64-zlib** are installed if you wish
182 to enable fio's log compression functionality.
183 2. Open the Cygwin Terminal.
184 3. Go to the fio directory (source files).
185 4. Run ``make clean && make -j``.
187 To build fio for 32-bit Windows, ensure the -i686 versions of the previously
188 mentioned -x86_64 packages are installed and run ``./configure
189 --build-32bit-win`` before ``make``.
191 It's recommended that once built or installed, fio be run in a Command Prompt or
192 other 'native' console such as console2, since there are known to be display and
193 signal issues when running it under a Cygwin shell (see
194 https://github.com/mintty/mintty/issues/56 and
195 https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/Tips#inputoutput-interaction-with-alien-programs
202 Fio uses Sphinx_ to generate documentation from the reStructuredText_ files.
203 To build HTML formatted documentation run ``make -C doc html`` and direct your
204 browser to :file:`./doc/output/html/index.html`. To build manual page run
205 ``make -C doc man`` and then ``man doc/output/man/fio.1``. To see what other
206 output formats are supported run ``make -C doc help``.
208 .. _reStructuredText: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/rest.html
209 .. _Sphinx: https://www.sphinx-doc.org
215 Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSX, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
216 Windows, FreeBSD, and DragonFly. Some features and/or options may only be
217 available on some of the platforms, typically because those features only apply
218 to that platform (like the solarisaio engine, or the splice engine on Linux).
220 Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be
221 implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is disk
222 utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that does exist
225 Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and some platforms do not
226 support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, on such platforms only
227 threads are supported. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or other
228 locking alternatives.
230 Other \*BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out of the
231 box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms, your
232 mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly
233 appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool
234 available on all platforms.
236 Note that POSIX aio is not enabled by default on AIX. Messages like these::
238 Symbol resolution failed for /usr/lib/libc.a(posix_aio.o) because:
239 Symbol _posix_kaio_rdwr (number 2) is not exported from dependent module /unix.
241 indicate one needs to enable POSIX aio. Run the following commands as root::
243 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
244 posix_aio0 Defined Posix Asynchronous I/O
245 # cfgmgr -l posix_aio0
246 # lsdev -C -l posix_aio0
247 posix_aio0 Available Posix Asynchronous I/O
249 POSIX aio should work now. To make the change permanent::
251 # chdev -l posix_aio0 -P -a autoconfig='available'
258 Running fio is normally the easiest part - you just give it the job file
259 (or job files) as parameters::
261 $ fio [options] [jobfile] ...
263 and it will start doing what the *jobfile* tells it to do. You can give more
264 than one job file on the command line, fio will serialize the running of those
265 files. Internally that is the same as using the :option:`stonewall` parameter
266 described in the parameter section.
268 If the job file contains only one job, you may as well just give the parameters
269 on the command line. The command line parameters are identical to the job
270 parameters, with a few extra that control global parameters. For example, for
271 the job file parameter :option:`iodepth=2 <iodepth>`, the mirror command line
272 option would be :option:`--iodepth 2 <iodepth>` or :option:`--iodepth=2
273 <iodepth>`. You can also use the command line for giving more than one job
274 entry. For each :option:`--name <name>` option that fio sees, it will start a
275 new job with that name. Command line entries following a
276 :option:`--name <name>` entry will apply to that job, until there are no more
277 entries or a new :option:`--name <name>` entry is seen. This is similar to the
278 job file options, where each option applies to the current job until a new []
281 fio does not need to run as root, except if the files or devices specified in
282 the job section requires that. Some other options may also be restricted, such
283 as memory locking, I/O scheduler switching, and decreasing the nice value.
285 If *jobfile* is specified as ``-``, the job file will be read from standard