so what gives. different man pages show different things for IO bi and bo ???

shouldn't bo mean "blocks out" and bi "blocks in" from perspective of the cpu ??

does redhat compile their vmstat differently ??




http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?vmstat
IO
bi: Blocks sent to a block device (blocks/s).
bo: Blocks received from a block device (blocks/s).


http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/vmstat8.html
IO
bi: Blocks received from a block device (blocks/s).
bo: Blocks sent to a block device (blocks/s).


[my system]
Red Hat Linux release 9 (Shrike) [and yeah, i know, very old OS]
vmstat -V procps version 2.0.11
man -V man, version 1.5k

man vmstat says:
VMSTAT(8)
IO
bi: Blocks sent to a block device (blocks/s).
bo: Blocks received from a block device (blocks/s).

My system is Slackware 9.1, kernel 2.4.22, but the experiment I performed should also work with your system.

Before we begin, my vmstat(8) man page says:

bi: blocks sent out to a block device (in blocks/s)
bo: blocks received from a block device (in blocks/s)

Do the following experiment on a fairly idle system. Do it only once. It relies on there being not too many directory blocks in main memory at the beginning.

If you need to repeat the experiment, then either reboot your system or perform a lot of other activity on it first.

The first step of the experiment is to do this:

vmstat 10

This causes the screen to show incremental results every 10 seconds. It should soon settle down to 0 and 0 for the bi and bo columns.

The second step of the experiment is done on a different screen, while the vmstat command is still running. It can be done in either of two ways.

The first way (preferable, because you can avoid logging in as root) is to choose a user account on your system which owns many, many files. Log in and do this:

du -s .

That's a period at the end of the command, with a space character just before it.
The second way is to log in as root, and do this:

du -s /

If this command takes a long time to finish, that's ok. Don't wait for it to finish. Just let it keep running and continue with the third step.

The third step is to return to the original screen where the vmstat command is running.

You might already see a line where the bi or bo quantity is far from 0. If you don't, wait for 10 seconds or so, and it will appear.

This far-from-zero quantity reflects the input of directory blocks.

On my system, that was the "bi" column.

On my system, the man page lies.

Hope this helps.