FIO is able to make us of environment variables and reserved keywords in job files. This can  avoid some work so that you don´t need to change the job files each time you call them.

Define a variable in a job file

The documentation is pretty nice:

So for example this is an entry in the job file where the size should be set via an environment variable.

Example of using environment variables

I would like to run four different job files and use for each run a different size (1MB,10MB,100MB,1G,10G,100G).

• Job1 is sequential read / 4 KB / 1 thread / ioengine=sync / iodepth=1
• Job2 is sequential write/ 4 KB / 1 thread / ioengine=sync / iodepth=1
• Job3 is random read / 4 KB / 1 thread / ioengine=sync / iodepth=1
• Job4 is random write / 4 KB / 1 thread / ioengine=sync / iodepth=1

I make use of the default settings under linux. For example I did not specify the block size which is 4K per default, but it is best practice to define them in case a default value may be changed.

Files:

jobfile1: read_4KB_numjob1_sync_iodepth1

jobfile2: write_4KB_numjob1_sync_iodepth1

jobfile3: randread_4KB_numjob1_sync_iodepth1

jobfile3: randwrite_4KB_numjob1_sync_iodepth1

 

Run fio:

1) Run with SIZE of 1M

Yes this could be done in one job file but often you are using predefined files from a vendor or a website like this and just want to call them with your size settings.

2) Run with SIZE of 10M

…. and so on.

Reserved keywords:

There are 3 documented reserved keywords:

• $pagesize           The architecture page size of the running system
• $mb_memory    Megabytes of total memory in the system
• $ncpus                Number of online available CPUs

You can use them in the command line or in the jobs files. They are substituted with the current system values when you run the job.

Use cases?

Lets say you would like to run a job with as much threads as online available CPUs.

file: read-x-threads

In my case (Testverse) there are 4 CPU cores with Hyper-Threading(HT) on. Means 8 threads.

Go Jenkins!