Pre-compiled fio uses instructions that are absent in QEMU emulated CPU

[trimsj]

The provided pre-compiled fio uses AVX instructions, and produces an Illegal instruction error on the QEMU's default emulated CPU. Please consider providing a binary compiled with -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic.

[trimsj]

compiled with -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic.

Oops, it should be --disable-native in ./configure, see
https://github.com/axboe/fio/blob/master/configure#L251

[masonr]

Thanks! I'll get this incorporated and start testing it out :)

[masonr]

Fixed in 9819339

[Daniel15]

Does this affect perf? I wonder if this change will show lower performance on some systems.

[masonr]

@Daniel15 - iperf was not affected by this as it doesn't incorporate AVX-specific CPU instructions in the binary. The fio binary was facing much more incompatibility issues compared to the iperf binary (which has rarely caused problems).

In any case, if a local binary/package is installed and found, the script will automatically defer to that instead of grabbing the pre-compiled binaries. So if worried about possible performance hits, feel free to install fio/iperf3 natively before running the script.

[trimsj]

I wonder if this change will show lower performance on some systems.

@Daniel15 I doubt it will, since it is mainly a I/O benchmark tool, not a CPU one.

The fio packages provided by Linux distributions are all compiled with --disable-native (e.g., Ubuntu) otherwise it won't run on a lot of machines.