Saturday, 26 November 2016

stress-ng 0.07.07 released

stress-ng is a tool that I have been developing on-and-off for a few years. It is designed to stress kernels to force out bugs, stress CPU and memory and also contains some performance benchmarking metrics too.

stress-ng is now entering the maturity part of the development phase, however, there is always scope to add new stressors and generally improve the tool.   I've just released version 0.07.07 for the Ubuntu Zesty 17.04 release and it contains a few additional features:
  • SIGUSR2 sent to stress-ng will dump out the current system load and memory statistics
  • Sched policy stress tests for different scheduler configurations
  • Add a missing --sockfd-port option
And various bug fixes:
  • Fixed up some minor memory leaks
  • Missing counter stats on bind-mount, fp-error, personality and resources stressors
  • Fix the --fiemap-bytes option
  • Fix up build warnings with various compilers and static analyzers
The major change to stress-ng over the past month was an internal re-working of system call and GNU features to abstract these into a shim layer to reduce the number build conditional #ifdef paths around code. This simplifies portability, so the code now builds more easily across a range of systems and with various versions of gcc and clang and fixes some issues on older kernels too.   This makes the code also faster to statically analyze with cppcheck.

For more details, visit the stress-ng project page or the quick help guide.