1INTRODUCTION: 2============= 3This patch integrates the Flexible Filesystem Benchmark (FFSB) with 4the autotest. This integration enables the high-performace I/O load testing in the 5KVM Virtual machine environment. 6 7FFSB is a filesystem performance measurement tool. It is a multi-threaded 8application (using pthreads), written entirely in C with cross-platform 9portability in mind. It differs from other filesystem benchmarks in that 10the user may supply a profile to create custom workloads, while most other 11filesystem benchmarks use a fixed set of randomly generated workloads. 12 13More information about the FFSB can be got from reading the README in the 14FFSB source directory which can be accessed from this link: 15[http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffsb/] 16 17With this integration, it is now possible to test a variety of filesystems on 18the KVM guest for : 19 20(1) directed I/O with sequential/random read/write. 21(2) buffered I/O with sequential/random read/write. 22(3) use varying block alignment boundaries to measure filesystem behaviour. 23(4) use multithreaded workloads to stress the filesystem. 24(5) Exert weighted combination of I/O workloads to analyze the I/O performace 25 for a specific scenario. 26(6) Age filesystem according to a specified workload upto a specified limit. 27 28 Since the only interface used for the integration is a FFSB configuration file; 29Autotest will be able to run variety of I/O tests on guest as FFSB improves, 30with no or minimal code change in Autotest itself. 31 32USE: 33==== 34To use the FFSB for Filesystem testing, two configuration files 35need to be modified - 36(1) Usual - tests.cfg file to activate the ffsb tests through KVM. 37(2) profile.cfg - where the workloads are specified. 38 39TODO: 40==== 41* Add validations for max. number of threads according to number of 42 vcpus exported by QEMU-KVM 43* Test Autotest/ffsb 44* Test FFSB itself. 45