virtiostat(8) System Manager's Manual virtiostat(8)
NAME
virtiostat - Trace VIRTIO devices input/output statistics. Uses Linux
eBPF/bcc.
SYNOPSIS
virtiostat [-h] [-T] [-D] [-d DRIVER] [-n DEVNAME] [INTERVAL] [COUNT]
DESCRIPTION
This tool traces VIRTIO devices input/output statistics. It works in
lower layer of VIRTIO base driver, so it could trace all the devices of
VIRTIO family. For example, we can't get IO statistics of 9p-fs in a
guest virtual machine by iostat command, but we can analyze IO statis-
tics by virtiostat. The outputing result shows In/Out SGs(scatter list
operation) to represent positive correlation IOPS, and In/Out BW to
represent throughput.
Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.
REQUIREMENTS
CONFIG_BPF and bcc.
OPTIONS
-h Print usage message.
-T Include a time column on output (HH:MM:SS).
-D Show debug infomation of bpf text.
-d DRIVER
Filter for driver name.
-n DEVNAME
Filter for device name.
INTERVAL
Print output every interval seconds.
COUNT Total count of trace in seconds.
EXAMPLES
Trace virtio device statistics and print 1 second summaries, 10 times:
# virtiostat 1 10
Trace virtio block deivces only:
# virtiostat -d virtio_blk
OVERHEAD
This traces the kernel virtqueue_add_sgs, virtqueue_add_outbuf,
virtqueue_add_inbuf, virtqueue_add_inbuf_ctx functions. The rate of
this depends on all the VIRTIO devices IOPS.
SOURCE
This is from bcc.
https://github.com/iovisor/bcc
Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file
containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.
OS
Linux
STABILITY
Unstable - in development.
AUTHOR
zhenwei pi
SEE ALSO
iostat(1), iftop(8), funccount(8)
USER COMMANDS 2021-02-15 virtiostat(8)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 05:45:57 CET 2025.