Update libhdfs engine documention and options

[fio.git] / HOWTO

diff --git a/HOWTO b/HOWTO
index d7283535db0d8ddff7908422185fe5cdb9480b76..a0b89c8071d15b45aaef71222611625e38022178 100644 (file)
--- a/HOWTO
+++ b/HOWTO
@@ -694,7 +694,21 @@ ioengine=str       Defines how the job issues io to the file. The following
                                having to go through FUSE. This ioengine
                                defines engine specific options.
 
-                       hdfs    Read and write through Hadoop (HDFS).
+                       libhdfs Read and write through Hadoop (HDFS).
+                               The 'filename' option is used to specify host,
+                               port of the hdfs name-node to connect. This
+                               engine interprets offsets a little
+                               differently. In HDFS, files once created
+                               cannot be modified. So random writes are not
+                               possible. To imitate this, libhdfs engine
+                               expects bunch of small files to be created
+                               over HDFS, and engine will randomly pick a
+                               file out of those files based on the offset
+                               generated by fio backend. (see the example
+                               job file to create such files, use rw=write
+                               option). Please note, you might want to set
+                               necessary environment variables to work with
+                               hdfs/libhdfs properly.
 
                        external Prefix to specify loading an external
                                IO engine object file. Append the engine