virtiostat(8)

📦 version 0.35.0, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

🎀 virtiostat 🎀

🦋 NAME

okay so virtiostat is a tracer for VIRTIO devices' input/output statistics 💅 It uses Linux eBPF/bcc, so it's basically built on bcc 🔥

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

virtiostat [-h] [-T] [-D] [-d DRIVER] [-n DEVNAME] [INTERVAL] [COUNT]

💖 DESCRIPTION

bestie, this tool traces input/output statistics for VIRTIO devices 🌸 It works in the lower layer of the VIRTIO base driver, so it can trace every device in the VIRTIO family ✨ Like, we can't see the IO stats of 9p-fs in a guest virtual machine with the iostat command, but virtiostat can analyze them, no cap 🙈

The output shows In/Out SGs (scatter list operations) to represent positive correlation IOPS, and In/Out BW to represent throughput 📈 So the SGs are the vibe for IOPS and the BW is the vibe for throughput 🫶

🔒 Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool. No root, no tracing, periodt 💀

🌈 REQUIREMENTS

You need CONFIG_BPF and bcc 🧚

🎀 OPTIONS

  • -h — prints the usage message 💅
  • -T — adds a time column to the output, formatted as HH:MM:SS ⏰
  • -D — shows debug info for the bpf text 🙈
  • -d DRIVER — filters by driver name 🦋
  • -n DEVNAME — filters by device name 🍓
  • INTERVAL — prints output every INTERVAL seconds ✨
  • COUNT — the total count of the trace, in seconds 🔥

🧚 EXAMPLES

Trace virtio device stats and print 1 second summaries, 10 times 💜

# virtiostat 1 10

Trace virtio block devices only 🌸

# virtiostat -d virtio_blk

⚡ OVERHEAD

This one traces the kernel virtqueue_add_sgs, virtqueue_add_outbuf, virtqueue_add_inbuf, and virtqueue_add_inbuf_ctx functions 👀 How much overhead you get depends on the IOPS of all the VIRTIO devices, so it can get a little intense 😭

🌷 SOURCE

This is from bcc 🌈 The link is:

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file, which has example usage, output, and commentary for this tool 📚

💻 OS

Linux 🐧

🧪 STABILITY

Unstable - in development. 🚧 Be gentle with it, it's still cooking 🍳

👑 AUTHOR

zhenwei pi 💜

🔗 SEE ALSO

iostat(1), iftop(8), funccount(8) 🫶

Footer check 🎀 this page lives in the USER COMMANDS section and was last updated 2021-02-15, so it's giving fresh but still classic 💅 Love you, bestie, and go trace some VIRTIO ✨🦋

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