a final few more features in stress-ng

While hoping to get a feature complete stress-ng sooner than later, I found a few more ways to fiendishly stress a system.

Stress-ng 0.01.22 will be landing soon in Ubuntu 14.10 with three more stress mechanisms:

• CPU affinity stressing; this rapidly changes CPU affinity of the stress processes just to keep the scheduling busy wasting effort.
• Timer stressing using the real-time clock; this allows one to generate a large amount of timer interrupts, so it is a useful interrupt saturation test.
• Directory entry thrashing; this creates and deletes a selectable number of zero length files and hence populates and destroys directory entries.

I have also removed the need to use rand() for random number generation for some of the stress tests and re-used a the faster MWC "random" number generator to add in some well known and very simple math operations for CPU stressing.

Stress-ng now has 15 different simple stress mechanisms that exercise CPU, cache, memory, file system, I/O and CPU schedulers.  I could add more tests, but I think this is a large enough set to allow one to thrash a machine and see how well it performs under pressure.

more stress with stress-ng

Since my last article about stress-ng I have been adding a few more stress mechanisms to stress-ng:

• file locking - exercise file locking with one or more processes (the more processes the better).
• fallocate - this allocates a 4MB file, sync's, truncates to zero size and syncs repeatedly
• yield - this loops on sched_yield() to repeatedly relinquish the CPU forcing a high context switch rate when run with multiple yielding processes.

Also, I have added some new features to tweak scheduling, I/O characteristics and memory allocations of the running stress processes:

• --sched and --sched-prio options to specify the scheduler type and priority
• --ionice-class and --ionice-level options to tweak I/O niceness
• --vm-populate option to populate (pre-fault) page tables for a mapping for the --vm stress test.

If I think of other mechanisms to stress the kernel I will add them, but for now, stress-ng is becoming almost feature complete.