.TH biostacks 8  "2019-07-12" "USER COMMANDS"
.SH NAME
biostacks \- Show disk I/O latency with initialization stacks. Uses bpftrace/eBPF.
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B biostacks
.SH DESCRIPTION
This tool shows disk I/O latency histograms for each block I/O initialization
path. This can help reveal the reason for different latencies, as some may
be created by log flushing, others by application reads, etc.

This works by tracing the blk_account_io_start() and the
blk_start_request() or blk_mq_start_request() functions using dynamic
instrumentation.
Linux 5.0 removed the classic I/O scheduler, so the blk_start_request()
probe can be removed from the tool (just delete it). This tool may need other
maintenance to keep working if these functions change in later kernels.

Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.
.SH REQUIREMENTS
CONFIG_BPF and bpftrace.
.SH EXAMPLES
.TP
Trace disk I/O latency with initialization stacks:
#
.B biostacks.bt
.SH FIELDS
.TP
0th
An initialization kernel stack trace (shown in "@[...]") is printed before each I/O histogram.
.TP
1st, 2nd
This is a range of I/O latency, in microseconds (shown in "[...)" set notation).
.TP
3rd
A column showing the count of I/O in this range.
.TP
4th
This is an ASCII histogram representing the count column.
.SH OVERHEAD
The rate of biostacks should be low (bounded by device IOPS), such that
the overhead of this tool is expected to be negligible.
.SH SOURCE
This tool originated from the book "BPF Performance Tools", published by
Addison Wesley (2019):
.IP
http://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html
.PP
See the book for more documentation on this tool.
.PP
This version is in the bpftrace repository:
.IP
https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace
.PP
Also look in the bpftrace distribution for a companion _examples.txt file
containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.
.SH OS
Linux
.SH STABILITY
Unstable - in development.
.SH AUTHOR
Brendan Gregg
.SH SEE ALSO
biosnoop(8)