Wednesday 6 May 2015

stress-ng updates for Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf

An on-going background project of mine is to add various interesting system stress tests to stress-ng.  Over the past several months I've been looking at the ways to exercise various less used or obscure system calls just to add more kernel coverage to the tool.
  • rlimit - generate tens of thousands of SIGXFSZ and many SIGXCPU signals
  • itimer - exercise ITIMER_PROF and generate SIGPROF signals
  • mlock - lock and unlock pages with mlock()/munlock()
  • timerfd - exercise rapid CLOCK_REALTIME events by select() and read() on a timerfd.
  • memfd - exercise anonymous populated page memory mapping and unmappoing using memfd.
  • more aggressive affinity stressor changes to force more CPU IPIs
  • hdd - add readv/writev I/O option
  • tee - tee data between a writer and reader process using tee()
  • crypt - encrypt data with MD5, SHA-256 and SHA-512 using libcrypt
  • mmapmany - perform tens of thousands of memory maps/unmaps to exhaust the per-process mapping limit.
  • zombie - fill up process table with tens of thousands of zombie processes
  • str - heavily exercise a range of glibc string functions
  • xattr - exercise file extended attributes
  • readahead - random reads with readaheads
  • vm - add a rowhammer memory stressor
..as well as extra per-stressor configuration settings and a lot of code clean up and bug fixing.

I've recently been using stress-ng to exercise various kernels on a range of hardware and it has been useful in forcing bugs, especially with the memory specific stressors that seem to trip low memory corner cases.

stress-ng 0.04.01 will be soon available in Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.  Visit the stress-ng project page for more details.

1 comment:

  1. Released yesterday! Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Installation Tutorial Step-by-Step
    http://goo.gl/W0UwIY

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