New features in stress-ng 0.12.12

The release of stress-ng 0.12.12 incorporates some useful features and a handful of new stressors.

Media devices such as HDDs and SSDs normally support Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) to detect and report various measurements of drive reliability.  To complement the various file system and I/O stressors, stress-ng now has a --smart option that checks for any changes in the S.M.A.R.T. measurements and will report these at the end of a stress run, for example:

..as one can see, there are errors on /dev/sdc and this explains why the ZFS pool was having performance issues.

For x86 CPUs I have added a new stressor to trigger System Management Interrupts via writes to port 0xb2 to force the CPU into System Management Mode in ring -2. The --smi stressor option will also measure the time taken to service the SMI. To run this stressor, one needs the --pathological option since this may hang the computer and they behave like non-maskable interrupts:

To exercise the munmap(2) system call a new munmap stressor has been added. This creates child processes that walk through their memory mappings from /proc/$pid/maps and unmap pages on libraries that are not being used. The unapping is performed by striding across the mapping in page multiples of prime size to create many mapping holes to exercise the VM mapping structures. These unmappings can create SIGSEGV segmentation faults that silently get handled and respawn a new child stressor. Example:

 

There some new options for the fork, vfork and vforkmany stressors, a new vm mode has been added to try and exercise virtual memory mappings. This enables detrimental performance virtual memory advice using  madvise  on  all  pages of the new child process. Where possible this will try to set every page in the new process with using madvise MADV_MERGEABLE, MADV_WILLNEED, MADV_HUGEPAGE  and  MADV_RANDOM flags.  The following shows how to enable the vm options for the fork and vfork stressors:

One final new feature is the --skip-silent option.  This will disable printing of messages when a stressor is skipped, for example, if the stressor is not supported by the kernel, the hardware or a support library is not available.

As usual for each release, stress-ng incorporates bug fixes and has been tested on a wide variety of Linux/*BSD/UNIX/POSIX systems and across a range of processor architectures (arm32, arm64, amd64, i386, ppc64el, RISC-V s390x, sparc64, m68k.  It has also been statically analysed with Coverity and cppcheck and built cleanly with pedantic build flags on gcc and clang.