FIO - A disk performance checking utility - Debian package
Recently I was going through my Newsforge feeds and I noticed an excellent article about a utility called “fio”. It is a disk performance checking utility - a better alternative to the good old “hdparm” utility.
My only issue was that there was no native package for the Debian repository. And I wanted to install one on my Debian (Lenny/testing) system. Therefore I decided to create a “.deb” package for the fio using checkinstall. Note that I had to use “checkinstall” instead of “debuild” because fio is not a native Debian package as I mentioned before. So I had to download the fio source and then create a Debian Binary package for fio on my Debian system.
I thought that people who also want to install fio on their Debian system can utilize the package that I created. This will save them the trouble of going through the process of making binary package although I have to say that it is not an overly complicated process.
You can download the file here.
Also I high recommend you to read README and HOWTO file that comes with the source. They are very comprehensive - very few ones are that great.
Update: Based on a feedback from one of the users, it seems that you will need to install libaio1 package (shared library) before you can install the FIO package. You can do this by:
# apt-get install libaio1
and then
# dpkg -i fio_1.19-etch-build-1_i386.deb
Enjoy the utility!
As usual, please leave a comment/feedback, if you have any.

May 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 am
Hi, thanks for your work, I was interested in this tool but was unable to compile it for my Ubuntu Edgy 7.10.
I installed your package with gdebi, but when I run it it was complaining about missing linux kernel aio access library (shared library)
‘install fio: error while loading shared libraries: libaio.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory’
After installing ‘libaio1′ (sudo apt-get install libaio1) everything seems working fine!
Thanks again!
May 4th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Hi Arbyto,
Thanks for the feedback. I have updated my post with the additional information that you provided.
Glad that it worked out fine for you.