| INTRODUCTION: |
| ============= |
| This patch integrates the Flexible Filesystem Benchmark (FFSB) with |
| the autotest. This integration enables the high-performace I/O load testing in the |
| KVM Virtual machine environment. |
| |
| FFSB is a filesystem performance measurement tool. It is a multi-threaded |
| application (using pthreads), written entirely in C with cross-platform |
| portability in mind. It differs from other filesystem benchmarks in that |
| the user may supply a profile to create custom workloads, while most other |
| filesystem benchmarks use a fixed set of randomly generated workloads. |
| |
| More information about the FFSB can be got from reading the README in the |
| FFSB source directory which can be accessed from this link: |
| [http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffsb/] |
| |
| With this integration, it is now possible to test a variety of filesystems on |
| the KVM guest for : |
| |
| (1) directed I/O with sequential/random read/write. |
| (2) buffered I/O with sequential/random read/write. |
| (3) use varying block alignment boundaries to measure filesystem behaviour. |
| (4) use multithreaded workloads to stress the filesystem. |
| (5) Exert weighted combination of I/O workloads to analyze the I/O performace |
| for a specific scenario. |
| (6) Age filesystem according to a specified workload upto a specified limit. |
| |
| Since the only interface used for the integration is a FFSB configuration file; |
| Autotest will be able to run variety of I/O tests on guest as FFSB improves, |
| with no or minimal code change in Autotest itself. |
| |
| USE: |
| ==== |
| To use the FFSB for Filesystem testing, two configuration files |
| need to be modified - |
| (1) Usual - tests.cfg file to activate the ffsb tests through KVM. |
| (2) profile.cfg - where the workloads are specified. |
| |
| TODO: |
| ==== |
| * Add validations for max. number of threads according to number of |
| vcpus exported by QEMU-KVM |
| * Test Autotest/ffsb |
| * Test FFSB itself. |
