README

stress-ng

stress-ng will stress test a computer system in various selectable ways. It
was designed to exercise various physical subsystems of a computer as well as
the various operating system kernel interfaces. Stress-ng features:

  * over 170 stress tests
  * over 50 CPU specific stress tests that exercise floating point, integer,
    bit manipulation and control flow
  * over 20 virtual memory stress tests

stress-ng was originally intended to make a machine work hard and trip hardware
issues such as thermal overruns as well as operating system bugs that only
occur when a system is being thrashed hard. Use stress-ng with caution as some
of the tests can make a system run hot on poorly designed hardware and also can
cause excessive system thrashing which may be difficult to stop.

stress-ng can also measure test throughput rates; this can be useful to observe
performance changes across different operating system releases or types of
hardware. However, it has never been intended to be used as a precise benchmark
test suite, so do NOT use it in this manner.

Running stress-ng with root privileges will adjust out of memory settings on
Linux systems to make the stressors unkillable in low memory situations, so use
this judiciously. With the appropriate privilege, stress-ng can allow the ionice
class and ionice levels to be adjusted, again, this should be used with care.

To build, the following libraries will ensure a fully functional stress-ng
build:

  * libaio-dev
  * libapparmor-dev
  * libattr1-dev
  * libbsd-dev
  * libcap-dev
  * libgcrypt11-dev
  * libkeyutils-dev
  * libsctp-dev
  * zlib1g-dev

NOTE: the build will try to detect build depedencies and will build an image with
functionality disabled if the support libraries are not installed.

To build on BSD systems, one requires gcc and GNU make:
        CC=gcc gmake

To build on MINIX, gmake and clang are required:
	CC=clang gmake

To build on SunOS, one requires GCC and GNU make, build using:
	CC=gcc gmake

To build a static image (example, for Android), use:
	STATIC=1 make

For more information, see: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~cking/stress-ng/