Creating large files in Solaris for testing purposes

In the Linux world, I use the dd utility to create files that need to be a certain size. Even though it works perfectly fine, its kind of annoying figuring out the output file’s size of the file. This is because the size is based on the bs (block size) value and the total number of block size count together.

For example, the following dd command creates a 300 mb file called 300mb-test-file. Each block size will be 1000 bytes, and I want of a total of 300,000 blocks. Formula: ( (1000 x 300000) / 1000000 )

[tony@bashninja ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=300mb-test-file bs=1000 count=300000
300000+0 records in
300000+0 records out
300000000 bytes (300 MB) copied, 2.0363 s, 147 MB/s

Luckily in the Solaris world this can be easily accomplished using the mkfile tool, without doing any conversion. We can even use this mkfile tool to easily create test disk files to experiment with ZFS!

root@solaris:~# mkfile 300m testdisk1
root@solaris:~# mkfile 300m testdisk2
root@solaris:~# ln -s /root/testdisk1 /dev/dsk/testdisk1
root@solaris:~# ln -s /root/testdisk2 /dev/dsk/testdisk2
root@solaris:~# zpool create tonytestpool mirror testdisk1 testdisk2
root@solaris:~# zpool status tonytestpool
  pool: tonytestpool
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

        NAME           STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        tonytestpool   ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0     ONLINE       0     0     0
            testdisk1  ONLINE       0     0     0
            testdisk2  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Tags: [ solaris zfs testing ]

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