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There's a mailing list associated with fio. It's meant for general
-discussion, bug reporting, questions - basically anything that has to
-do with fio. An automated mail detailing recent commits is automatically
-sent to the list at most daily. The list address is fio-devel@kernel.dk,
-subscribe by sending an empty email to fio-devel+subscribe@kernel.dk.
+discussion, bug reporting, questions, and development - basically anything
+that has to do with fio. An automated mail detailing recent commits is
+automatically sent to the list at most daily. The list address is
+fio@vger.kernel.org, subscribe by sending an email to
+majordomo@vger.kernel.org with
+
+subscribe fio
+
+in the body of the email. There is no archive for the new list yet,
+archives for the old list can be found here:
+
+http://maillist.kernel.dk/fio-devel/
Building
parse Dump info related to option matching and parsing
diskutil Dump info related to disk utilization updates
job:x Dump info only related to job number x
+ mutex Dump info only related to mutex up/down ops
? or help Show available debug options.
You can specify as many as you want, eg --debug=file,mem will enable
Fio has an internal allocator for shared memory called smalloc. It
allocates shared structures from this pool. The pool defaults to 1024k
-in size, and can grow to 32 pools. If running large jobs with randommap
+in size, and can grow to 128 pools. If running large jobs with randommap
enabled it can run out of memory, in which case the --alloc-size switch
-is handy for starting with a larger pool size.
+is handy for starting with a larger pool size. The backing store is
+files in /tmp. Fio cleans up after itself, while it is running you
+may see .fio_smalloc.* files in /tmp.
Job file
also include k/m postfix.
direct=x 1 for direct IO, 0 for buffered IO
thinktime=x "Think" x usec after each io
- rate=x Throttle rate to x KiB/sec
- ratemin=x Quit if rate of x KiB/sec can't be met
+ rate=x Throttle rate to x KB/sec
+ ratemin=x Quit if rate of x KB/sec can't be met
ratecycle=x ratemin averaged over x msecs
cpumask=x Only allow job to run on CPUs defined by mask.
cpus_allowed=x Like 'cpumask', but allow text setting of CPU affinity.
verify=x If 'x' == md5, use md5 for verifies. If 'x' == crc32,
use crc32 for verifies. md5 is 'safer', but crc32 is
a lot faster. Only makes sense for writing to a file.
+ For other types of checksumming, see HOWTO.
stonewall Wait for preceeding jobs to end before running.
numjobs=x Create 'x' similar entries for this job
thread Use pthreads instead of forked jobs
cpuchunks=x Split burn cycles into pieces of x usecs.
+
+Platforms
+---------
+
+Fio works on (at least) Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. Some features and/or
+options may only be available on some of the platforms, typically because
+those features only apply to that platform (like the solarisaio engine, or
+the splice engine on Linux).
+
+Some features are not available on FreeBSD/Solaris even if they could be
+implemented, I'd be happy to take patches for that. An example of that is
+disk utility statistics and (I think) huge page support, support for that
+does exist in FreeBSD/Solaris.
+
+Fio uses pthread mutexes for signalling and locking and FreeBSD does not
+support process shared pthread mutexes. As a result, only threads are
+supported on FreeBSD. This could be fixed with sysv ipc locking or
+other locking alternatives.
+
+Other *BSD platforms are untested, but fio should work there almost out
+of the box. Since I don't do test runs or even compiles on those platforms,
+your mileage may vary. Sending me patches for other platforms is greatly
+appreciated. There's a lot of value in having the same test/benchmark tool
+available on all platforms.
+
+
+
Author
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