Creating a Quick I/O File Using qiomkfile

The best way to make regular files accessible to the Quick I/O interface and preallocate space for them is to use the qiomkfile command. Unlike the VxFS setext command, which requires superuser privileges, any user who has read/write permissions can run qiomkfile to create the files. The qiomkfile command has five options:

You can specify file size in terms of bytes (the default), or in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, sectors (512 bytes), or terabytes by adding a k, K, m, M, g, G, s, S, t, or T suffix. If the size of the file including the header is not a multiple of the file system block size, it is rounded to a multiple of the file system block size before preallocation.

The qiomkfile command creates two files: a regular file with preallocated, contiguous space; and a symbolic link pointing to the Quick I/O name extension. For example, to create a 100 MB file named dbfile in /database, enter:

In this example, the first file created is a regular file named /database/.dbfile (which has the real space allocated).

The second file is a symbolic link named /database/dbfile. This is a relative link to /database/.dbfile via the Quick I/O interface, that is, to .dbfile::cdev:vxfs:. This allows .dbfile to be accessed by any database or application as a raw character device. To check the results, enter:

or:

If you specify the -a option to qiomkfile, an absolute path name (see Using Absolute or Relative Path Names) is used so /database/dbfile points to /database/.dbfile::cdev:vxfs:. To check the results, enter:

See the qiomkfile(1) manual page for more information.