FSL's Filebench Linux/FreeBSD Port

FSL's Filebench Port

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FSL Filebench port became a mainline! We maintain the official Filebench page hosted at Sourceforge. Please look for all information there.

This page aimed to maintain Filebench port for Linux/FreeBSD platforms. In June 2011 this port replaced the mainline Filebench; this page is only for historical purposes.

News

2011 Jun 8	FSL Filebench port became a mainline! This page is not maintened any more. Please, go to filebench.sourceforge.net for new releases and support.
2010 Dec 30	Version 1.4.8.fsl.0.8 (depricated with 1.4.9 release) released! Address space randomization problem addressed, thread model removed, ioprios support added, min and max latencies for flowops added, other.
2010 Aug 24	Version 1.4.8.fsl.0.7 released! SEGFAULT caused by invalid random number generation fixed, dirsizegamma parameter fix, other.
2010 June 18	Version 1.4.8.fsl.0.6 released! Deadlock while thread creation fixed, posset feature added, other.
2010 Apr 6	Version 1.4.8.fsl.0.5 released! Compilation for SUN Studio compilers fixed.
2010 Apr 5	Version 1.4.8.fsl.0.4 released! Direct I/O support, FreeBSD fixes for process model, `noreadahead` attribute and raw devices support, other.

Why?

Below are the reasons why this port existed:

SUN's version is not compilable on Linux/FreeBSD
Bugs in the original version
Certain features we wanted to add
Could not push fixes to the upstream (no response from the developers)
Looks like the legacy Filebench development stopped in 2009 (link)
Multiple posts in the Internet saying that people need Filebench for Linux/FreeBSD
Filebench is a powerful tool and we wanted to use its power in our research

Summary of changes

It is important to notice that we did NOT change the major mechanism how Filebench functions. Moreover, human interface is not touched too (we only added some new commands). I.e., if you have used original Filebench before, you don't need to study it again. Most important changes are:

Autotools building mechanism is completely reforged to support a variety of UNIX-like OSes
Compilation error and warning fixes on Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/OpenSolaris platforms for both 32 and 64 bit systems
Direct I/O support fixed on Linux/FreeBSD
Removal of scripts/xanadu: only the files required to create go_filebench binary are in the port
Addition of the OSPROF and min and max latency functionality
noreadahed flowop attribute added to disable readahead
Automatic increase of the opened files and shared memory limits
Use /proc/<pid>/stat/ on Linux go get per process per flowop statistics
Allow compilation if libtecla is not available
A number of fixes to make the number of CPU microseconds per operation correct on Linux
Fixes to report results correctly both on 64 and 32 bit systems
Use process model by default in all cases on all platforms
Creation of the list of conditional compilations, so that you can compare Filebench configurations running on different platforms
Solaris-specific conditional compilations and "tricks" are removed
Fixing loop exit condition and not bzero()ing aiocb in the the aio_write flowop
sigignore() and waitid() emulation for FreeBSD platforms
Allowing to snapshot statistice multiple times during the benchmark run.
Deadlock while thread creation fixed.
dirsizegamma parameter was not working properly in legacy Filebench
Posset feature added.
ioprio support added
Thread model support was removed, as it does not reflect real picture.
Code cleanup

For the complete list of changes look into ChangeLog.

Support

Visit official Filebench page for all sorts of support.

Download

Visit official Filebench page for fresh versions.

Courtesy

We believe that Filebench is a powerful tool for a versatile file system and storage performance analysis. We thank the authors: Richard McDougall, Neelakanth Nadgir, Shawn Debnath, Spencer Shepler - for their great job. We also thank SUN Microsystems for supporting those people.
We also would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Evgeny Budilovsky (Fix of a deadlock while thread creation)