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STRESS-NG(1) General Commands Manual STRESS-NG(1) NAME stress-ng - stress "next generation", a tool to load and stress a com- puter system SYNOPSIS stress-ng [OPTION [ARG]] ... DESCRIPTION stress-ng will stress test a computer system in various selectable ways. It was designed to exercise physical subsystems of a computer as well as operating system kernel interfaces. stress-ng also has a wide range of CPU specific stress tests that exercise floating point, inte- ger, bit manipulation, cache, vector instructions and control flow. 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 thrash- ing 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 set- tings 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. One can specify the number of processes to invoke per type of stress test; specifying a zero value will select the number of processors available as defined by sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_CONF), if that can't be determined then the number of online CPUs is used. If the value is less than zero then the number of online CPUs is used. Specifying the number as a percentage will select the percentage of configured CPUs (trun- cated down to nearest whole number). OPTIONS General stress-ng control options: --abort this option will force all running stressors to abort (termi- nate) if any other stressor terminates prematurely because of a failure. -A, --aggressive enables more file, cache and memory aggressive options as well as forcing processes to change CPU affinity very frequently. This will slow tests down, increase latencies and reduce the number of bogo ops as well as changing the balance of user time vs system time used depending on the type of stressor being used. -a N, --all N, --parallel N start N instances of all stressors in parallel. If N is less than zero, then the number of CPUs online is used for the number of instances. If N is zero, then the number of configured CPUs in the system is used. Specifying N as a percentage will select the percentage of configured CPUs (truncated down to nearest whole number). OPTIONS --autogroup with this option any successful nice(2) call will attempt to also set the /proc/self/autogroup setting to the niceness level of the calling process. This is a Linux only option for the CFS scheduler when CONFIG_SCHED_AUTOGROUP is enabled, see sched(7) for more details on how this affects interactive scheduling be- haviour. -b N, --backoff N wait N microseconds between the start of each stress worker process. This allows one to ramp up the stress tests over time. --buildinfo report build information such as build date and time, compiler used, compilation and linker flags, standard C version used. --c-states report CPU C-state residencies. --change-cpu this forces child processes of some stressors to change to a different CPU from the parent on startup. Note that during the execution of the stressor the scheduler may choose move the par- ent onto the same CPU as the child. The stressors affected by this option are client/server style stressors, such as the net- work stressors (sock, sockmany, udp, etc) or context switching stressors (switch, pipe, etc). --class name specify the class of stressors to run. Stressors are classified into one or more of the following classes: compute, cpu, cpu-cache, device, fp, gpu, interrupt, integer, ipc, io, filesystem, memory, network, os, pipe, scheduler, search, sig- nal, sort, vector and vm. Some stressors fall into just one class. For example the `get' stressor is just in the `os' class. Other stressors fall into more than one class, for example, the `lsearch' stressor falls into the `cpu', `cpu-cache', `memory' and `search' classes as it exercises all these four. Selecting a specific class will run all the stressors that fall into that class only when run with the --sequential option. Specifying a name followed by an escaped question mark (for ex- ample --class vm\?) will print out all the stressors in that specific class. --config print out the configuration used to build stress-ng. -n, --dry-run parse options, but do not run stress tests. A no-op. --ftrace enable kernel function call tracing (Linux only). This will use the kernel debugfs ftrace mechanism to record all the kernel functions used on the system while stress-ng is running. This is only as accurate as the kernel ftrace output, so there may be some variability on the data reported. -h, --help show help. --ignite-cpu alter kernel controls to try and maximize the CPU. This requires root privilege to alter various /sys interface controls. Cur- rently this only works for Intel P-State enabled x86 systems on Linux. --interrupts check for any system management interrupts or error interrupts that occur, for example thermal overruns, machine check excep- tions, etc. Note that the interrupts are accounted to all the concurrently running stressors, so total count for all stressors is over accounted. --ionice-class class specify ionice class (only on Linux). Can be idle (default), besteffort, be, realtime, rt. --ionice-level level specify ionice level (only on Linux). For idle, 0 is the only possible option. For besteffort or realtime values 0 (highest priority) to 7 (lowest priority). See ionice(1) for more de- tails. -I S, --iostat S every S seconds show I/O statistics on the device that stores the stress-ng temporary files. This is either the device of the current working directory or the --temp-path specified path. Currently a Linux only option. The fields output are: Column Heading Explanation Inflight number of I/O requests that have been issued to the device driver but have not yet completed Rd K/s read rate in 1024 bytes per second Wr K/s write rate in 1024 bytes per second Rd/s reads per second Wr/s writes per second -j jobfile, --job jobfile run stressors using a jobfile. The jobfile is essentially a file containing stress-ng options (without the leading --) with one option per line. Lines may have comments with comment text proceeded by the # character. A simple example is as follows: run sequential # run stressors sequentially verbose # verbose output metrics-brief # show metrics at end of run timeout 60s # stop each stressor after 60 seconds # # vm stressor options: # vm 2 # 2 vm stressors vm-bytes 128M # 128 MB available memory shared by 2 vm stressors vm-keep # keep vm mapping vm-populate # populate memory # # memcpy stressor options: # memcpy 5 # 5 memcpy stressors The job file introduces the run command that specifies how to run the stressors: run sequential - run stressors sequentially run parallel - run stressors together in parallel Note that `run parallel' is the default. --keep-files do not remove files and directories created by the stressors. This can be useful for debugging purposes. Not generally recom- mended as it can fill up a file system. -k, --keep-name by default, stress-ng will attempt to change the name of the stress processes according to their functionality; this option disables this and keeps the process names to be the name of the parent process, that is, stress-ng. -K, --klog-check check the kernel log for kernel error and warning messages and report these as soon as they are detected. Linux only and re- quires root capability to read the kernel log. --ksm enable kernel samepage merging (Linux only). This is a memory- saving de-duplication feature for merging anonymous (private) pages. --limit-as set stressor process's maximum size of the virtual memory (ad- dress space), see rlimit(2) RLIMIT_AS. The parameter can be specified as an absolute number of bytes (e.g. 1G for 1 GB) or a percentage of the current free memory, e.g. 20% --limit-data set stressor process's maximum size of the data segment (ini- tialized data, uninitialized data, and heap), see rlimit(2) RLIMIT_DATA. The parameter can be specified as an absolute num- ber of bytes (e.g. 128M for 128 MB) or a percentage of the cur- rent free memory, e.g. 5% --limit-stack set stressor process's maximum size of the stack, see rlimit(2) RLIMIT_STACK. The parameter can be specified as an absolute num- ber of bytes (e.g. 2M for 2 MB) or a percentage of the current free memory, e.g. 1% --log-brief by default stress-ng will report the name of the program, the message type and the process id as a prefix to all output. The --log-brief option will output messages without these fields to produce a less verbose output. -L filename, --log-file filename write messages to the specified log file, this does not replace the output from stdout, but creates a logged copy of it in the specified file. Lines of output are automatically fsync'd to the log file to try to reduce data loss. --log-lockless log messages use a lock to avoid intermingling of blocks of stressor messages, however this may cause contention when emit- ting a high rate of logging messages in verbose mode with many stressors are running, for example when testing CPU scaling with many processes on many CPUs. This option disables log message locking. --make-it-fail enable fault injection on stressor processes (Linux only, needs to run with root permission to write to /proc/self/make-it- fail). The appropriate Linux kernel /sys/kernel/debug fault in- jection sysfs interfaces need to be set inconjunction when using this option and the kernel requires fault injection to be en- abled. --maximize overrides the default stressor settings and instead sets these to the maximum settings allowed. These defaults can always be overridden by the per stressor settings options if required. --max-fd N set the maximum limit on file descriptors (value or a % of sys- tem allowed maximum). By default, stress-ng can use all the available file descriptors; this option sets the limit in the range from 10 up to the maximum limit of RLIMIT_NOFILE. One can use a % setting too, e.g. 50% is half the maximum allowed file descriptors. Note that stress-ng will use about 5 of the avail- able file descriptors so take this into consideration when using this setting. --mbind list set strict NUMA memory allocation based on the list of NUMA nodes provided; page allocations will come from the node with sufficient free memory closest to the specified node(s) where the allocation takes place. This uses the Linux set_mempolicy(2) call using the MPOL_BIND mode. The NUMA nodes to be used are specified by a comma separated list of node (0 to N-1). One can specify a range of NUMA nodes using `-', for example: --mbind 0,2-3,6,7-11 -M, --metrics output number of bogo operations in total performed by the stress processes. Note that these are not a reliable metric of performance or throughput and have not been designed to be used for benchmarking whatsoever. Some stressors have additional metrics that are more useful than bogo-ops, and these are gener- ally more useful for observing how a system behaves when under various kinds of load. The following columns of information are output: Column Heading Explanation bogo ops number of iterations of the stressor during the run. This is metric of how much overall "work" has been achieved in bogo operations. Do not use this as a reliable measure of throughput for benchmarking. real time (secs) average wall clock duration (in sec- onds) of the stressor. This is the total wall clock time of all the in- stances of that particular stressor divided by the number of these stressors being run. usr time (secs) total user time (in seconds) con- sumed running all the instances of the stressor. sys time (secs) total system time (in seconds) con- sumed running all the instances of the stressor. bogo ops/s (real time) total bogo operations per second based on wall clock run time. The wall clock time reflects the appar- ent run time. The more processors one has on a system the more the work load can be distributed onto these and hence the wall clock time will reduce and the bogo ops rate will increase. This is essentially the "apparent" bogo ops rate of the system. bogo ops/s (usr+sys time) total bogo operations per second based on cumulative user and system time. This is the real bogo ops rate of the system taking into con- sideration the actual time execution time of the stressor across all the processors. Generally this will de- crease as one adds more concurrent stressors due to contention on cache, memory, execution units, buses and I/O devices. CPU used per instance (%) total percentage of CPU used divided by number of stressor instances. 100% is 1 full CPU. Some stressors run multiple threads so it is possi- ble to have a figure greater than 100%. RSS Max (KB) resident set size (RSS), the portion of memory (measured in Kilobytes) occupied by a process in main mem- ory. --metrics-brief show shorter list of stressor metrics (no CPU used per in- stance). --minimize overrides the default stressor settings and instead sets these to the minimum settings allowed. These defaults can always be overridden by the per stressor settings options if required. --no-madvise from version 0.02.26 stress-ng automatically calls madvise(2) with random advise options before each mmap and munmap to stress the vm subsystem a little harder. The --no-advise option turns this default off. --no-oom-adjust disable any form of out-of-memory score adjustments, keep the system defaults. Normally stress-ng will adjust the out-of-mem- ory scores on stressors to try to create more memory pressure. This option disables the adjustments. --no-rand-seed Do not seed the stress-ng pseudo-random number generator with a quasi random start seed, but instead seed it with constant val- ues. This forces tests to run each time using the same start conditions which can be useful when one requires reproducible stress tests. --oom-avoid Attempt to avoid out-of-memory conditions that can lead to the Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer terminating stressors. This checks for low memory scenarios and swapping before making memory allo- cations and hence adds some overhead to the stressors and will slow down stressor allocation speeds. --oom-avoid-bytes N Specify a low memory threshold to avoid making any further mem- ory allocations. The parameter can be specified as an absolute number of bytes (e.g. 2M for 2 MB) or a percentage of the cur- rent free memory, e.g. 5% (the default is 2.5%). This option implicitly enables --oom-avoid. The option allows the system to have enough free memory to try to avoid the out-of-memory killer terminating processes. --oom-no-child Disable running stressor as a child process with a parent that checks for Out-of-Memory (OOM) issues. This reduces additional child process overhead but indirectly also disables respawning of OOM'd stressors, OOM detection and may lead to bogo-op veri- fication errors. -O, --oomable Do not respawn a stressor if it gets killed by the Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer. The default behaviour is to restart a new in- stance of a stressor if the kernel OOM killer terminates the process. This option disables this default behaviour. --page-in touch allocated pages that are not in core, forcing them to be paged back in. This is a useful option to force all the allo- cated pages to be paged in when using the bigheap, mmap and vm stressors. It will severely degrade performance when the memory in the system is less than the allocated buffer sizes. This uses mincore(2) to determine the pages that are not in core and hence need touching to page them back in. --pathological enable stressors that are known to hang systems. Some stressors can rapidly consume resources that may hang a system, or perform actions that can lock a system up or cause it to reboot. These stressors are not enabled by default, this option enables them, but you probably don't want to do this. You have been warned. This option applies to the stressors: bad-ioctl, bind-mount, cpu-online, mlockmany, oom-pipe, smi, sysinval and watchdog. --pause T pause T seconds between each stressor. This is useful for allow- ing systems to cool down between each stressor invocation. By default this option is disabled. --perf measure processor and system activity using perf events. Linux only and caveat emptor, according to perf_event_open(2): "Always double-check your results! Various generalized events have had wrong values". Note that with Linux 4.7 one needs to have CAP_SYS_ADMIN capabilities for this option to work, or adjust /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid to below 2 to use this without CAP_SYS_ADMIN. --permute N run all permutations of the selected stressors with N instances of the permutated stressors per run. If N is less than zero, then the number of CPUs online is used for the number of in- stances. If N is zero, then the number of configured CPUs in the system is used. Specifying N as a percentage will select the percentage of configured CPUs (truncated down to nearest whole number). This will perform multiple runs with all the permuta- tions of the stressors up to 2^20 permumtations. Use this in conjunction with the --with or --class option to specify the stressors to permute. --progress display the run progress when running stressors with the --se- quential option. -q, --quiet do not show any output. -r N, --random N start N random stress workers. If N is 0, then the number of configured processors is used for N. --randprocname enable random stressor process name generation. This scrambles the stressor process names to try to confuse process monitoring and potential smart process scheduling that uses process names to make system tuning changes. --rapl Report the Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) energy measure- ments of stressor instances. Currently Linux and x86 only, re- quires root access rights to read RAPL kernel interfaces. Note that the RAPL domains supported may vary between devices. --raplstat S every S seconds show RAPL energy measurements. Currently Linux and x86 only, requires root access rights to read RAPL kernel interfaces. --resctrl p1[,p2,..,pn],s1[,s2..,sm] specify resource control cache partitions and apply to stressor instances (ARM MPAM only) p1..pn are a list of 1 to n cache partitioning definitions, where p1..pn are of the form: pN=node[:cachelevel]:hexbitmask:bandwidth where: • pN is the partition definition name where N is a number, e.g. p1 • node specifies cluster node of CPUs to use • cachelevel specifies the cache level to use (optional, the de- fault is the MPAM default L3 level) • hexbitmask is a hexadecimal bitmask specifying cache portions to use • bandwidth is the bandwidth to use, for MPAM this is % utiliza- tion 1..100 for example: p1=1:L3:fff:50 s1..sm are a list of 1 to m of stressor instances that apply these cache partitioning settings of the form: stressor-name=stressor-instances@pN where: • stressor-name is the name of a stressor • stressor-instances is a list of instances where cache parti- tioning setting pN is applied. • pN specifies the cache partition pN the following example applies resctrl partition p1 to the matrix stressor on instances 0, 1, 5, 8, 12, 13 and 14: matrix=0-1,5,8,12-14@p1 The following example specifies two resctrl partitions, p1 uses cluster node 1, L3 cache, uses the first 3 cache portions and sets this to 10% utilisation. p2 uses cluaser 1, the default L3 cache, all cache portions except the first 32 and sets this to 90% utilisation. The 3 stream stressor instances are run where stream stressor instances 0 to 1 use p1, and instance 2 uses p2. sudo stress-ng --resctrl p1=1:l3:7:10,p2=1:ff8:90,\ stream=0-1@p1,stream=2@p2 --stream 3 Note that invalid resctrl parameters applied to the resctrl sysfs will generate EINVAL errors. They are not sanity checked during option parsing as these can only be determined at the time they are applied. --sched scheduler select the named scheduler (only on Linux). To see the list of available schedulers use: stress-ng --sched which --sched-prio prio select the scheduler priority level (only on Linux). If the scheduler does not support this then the default priority level of 0 is chosen. --sched-period period select the period parameter for deadline scheduler (only on Linux). Default value is 0 (in nanoseconds). --sched-runtime runtime select the runtime parameter for deadline scheduler (only on Linux). Default value is 99999 (in nanoseconds). --sched-deadline deadline select the deadline parameter for deadline scheduler (only on Linux). Default value is 100000 (in nanoseconds). --sched-reclaim use cpu bandwidth reclaim feature for deadline scheduler (only on Linux). --seed N set the random number generate seed with a 64 bit value. Allows stressors to use the same random number generator sequences on each invocation. --settings show the various option settings. --sequential N sequentially run all the stressors one by one for a default of 60 seconds. The number of instances of each of the individual stressors to be started is N. If N is less than zero, then the number of CPUs online is used for the number of instances. If N is zero, then the number of CPUs in the system is used. Speci- fying N as a percentage will select the percentage of configured CPUs (truncated down to nearest whole number). OPTIONS Use the --timeout option to specify the duration to run each stressor. --skip-silent silence messages that report that a stressor has been skipped because it requires features not supported by the system, such as unimplemented system calls, missing resources or processor specific features. --smart scan the block devices for changes S.M.A.R.T. statistics (Linux only). This requires root privileges to read the Self-Monitor- ing, Analysis and Reporting Technology data from all block de- vies and will report any changes in the statistics. One caveat is that device manufacturers provide different sets of data, the exact meaning of the data can be vague and the data may be inac- curate. --sn use scientific notation (e.g. 2.412e+01) for metrics. --status N report every N seconds the number of running, exiting, reaped and failed stressors, number of stressors that received SIGARLM termination signal as well as the current run duration. --stderr write messages to stderr. With version 0.15.08 output is written to stdout, previously due to a historical oversight output went to stderr. This option allows one to revert to the pre-0.15.08 behaviour. --stdout all output goes to stdout. This is the new default for version 0.15.08. Use the --stderr option for the original behaviour. --stressor-time (requires -v flag) log as debug the start and finish run times of each stressor instance, logged in the format: stressor [start|finish] HR:MN:SS.HS YYYY:MM:DD where HR is hours, MN is minutes, SS is seconds, HS is hundredths of seconds, YYYY is years, MM is months, DD is day of the month. If localtime(2) is not supported the time is logged as seconds past the Epoch. --stressors output the names of the available stressors. --sync-start synchromize start, wait for stressors to be created and start all stressors once they are all in a ready to run state. --syslog log output (except for verbose -v messages) to the syslog. --taskset list set CPU affinity based on the list of CPUs provided; stress-ng is bound to just use these CPUs (for systems that provide sched_setaffinity(2)). The CPUs to be used are specified by a comma separated list of CPU (0 to N-1). One can specify a range of CPUs using `-', for example: --taskset 0,2-3,6,7-11 or the following keywords: Keyword Description even even numbered CPUs odd odd numbered CPUs all all CPUs random random selection of CPUs packageN CPUs in package N as specified by /sys/devices/sys- tem/cpu/cpu*/topology/package_cpus_list clusterN CPUs in package N as specified by /sys/devices/sys- tem/cpu/cpu*/topology/cluster_cpus_list dieN CPUs in package N as specified by /sys/devices/sys- tem/cpu/cpu*/topology/die_cpus_list coreN CPUs in package N as specified by /sys/devices/sys- tem/cpu/cpu*/topology/core_cpus_list --taskset-random randomly change stressor CPU affinity at five times the clock tick rate (if defined) or at 400Hz while waiting for stressors to complete. --temp-path path specify a path for stress-ng temporary directories and temporary files; the default path is the current working directory. This path must have read and write access for the stress-ng stress processes. --thermalstat S every S seconds show CPU and thermal load statistics. This op- tion shows average CPU frequency in GHz (average of online- CPUs), the minimum CPU frequency, the maximum CPU frequency, load averages (1 minute, 5 minute and 15 minutes) and available thermal zone temperatures in degrees Centigrade. --thrash This can only be used when running on Linux and with root privi- lege. This option starts a background thrasher process that works through all the processes on a system and tries to page-in as many pages in the processes as possible. It also periodically drops the page cache, frees reclaimable slab objects and page- cache as well as assign pages to different NUMA nodes. This will cause considerable amount of thrashing of swap on an over- committed system. -t N, --timeout T run each stress test for at least T seconds. One can also spec- ify the units of time in seconds, minutes, hours, days or years with the suffix s, m, h, d or y. Each stressor will be sent a SIGALRM signal at the timeout time, however if the stress test is swapped out, in an uninterruptible system call or performing clean up (such as removing hundreds of test file) it may take a while to finally terminate. A 0 timeout will run stress-ng for ever with no timeout. The default timeout is 24 hours. --times show the cumulative user and system times of all the child processes at the end of the stress run. The percentage of util- isation of available CPU time is also calculated from the number of on-line CPUs in the system. --timestamp add a timestamp in hours, minutes, seconds and hundredths of a second to the log output. --timer-slack N adjust the per process timer slack to N nanoseconds (Linux only). Increasing the timer slack allows the kernel to coalesce timer events by adding some fuzziness to timer expiration times and hence reduce wakeups. Conversely, decreasing the timer slack will increase wakeups. A value of 0 for the timer-slack will set the system default of 50000 nanoseconds. --tz collect temperatures from the available thermal zones on the ma- chine (Linux only). Some devices may have one or more thermal zones, where as others may have none. -v, --verbose show all debug, warnings and normal information output. --verify verify results when a test is run. This is not available on all tests. This will sanity check the computations or memory con- tents from a test run and report with the `fail' tag failures that are detected. --verifiable print the names of stressors that can be verified with the --verify option. -V, --version show version of stress-ng, version of toolchain used to build stress-ng and system information. --vmstat S every S seconds show statistics about processes, memory, paging, block I/O, interrupts, context switches, disks and cpu activity. The output is similar that to the output from the vmstat(8) utility. Not fully supported on various UNIX systems. --vmstat-units [ k | m | g | t | p | e ] specify vmstat memory units in terms of kilobytes (k), megabytes (m), gigabytes (g), terabytes (t), petabytes (p) or exabytes (e). Default is in kilobytes. -w, --with list specify stressors to run when using the --all, --seq or --per- mute options. For example to run 5 instances of the cpu, hash, nop and vm stressors one after another (sequentially) for 1 minute per stressor use: stress-ng --seq 5 --with cpu,hash,nop,vm --timeout 1m -x, --exclude list specify a list of one or more stressors to exclude (that is, do not run them). This is useful to exclude specific stressors when one selects many stressors to run using the --class option, --sequential, --all and --random options. Example, run the cpu class stressors concurrently and exclude the numa and search stressors: stress-ng --class cpu --all 1 -x numa,bsearch,hsearch,lsearch -Y, --yaml filename output gathered statistics to a YAML formatted file named `file- name'. Stressor specific options: Access stressor --access N start N workers that work through various settings of file mode bits (read, write, execute) for the file owner and checks if the user permissions of the file using access(2) and faccessat(2) are sane. --access-ops N stop access workers after N bogo access sanity checks. POSIX Access Control List Stressor --acl N start N workers that exercise permutations of ACL access permission settings on user, group and other tags. --acl-rand randomize (by shuffling) the order of the ACL access per- missions before exercising ACLs. --acl-ops N stop acl workers after N bogo acl settings have been set. Affinity stressor --affinity N start N workers that run 16 processes that rapidly change CPU affinity (for systems that provide sched_setaffin- ity(2)). Rapidly switching CPU affinity can contribute to poor cache behaviour and high context switch rate. --affinity-delay N delay for N nanoseconds before changing affinity to the next CPU. The delay will spin on CPU scheduling yield op- erations for N nanoseconds before the process is moved to another CPU. The default is 0 nanosconds. --affinity-ops N stop affinity workers after N bogo affinity operations. --affinity-pin pin all the 16 per stressor processes to a CPU. All 16 processes follow the CPU chosen by the main parent stres- sor, forcing heavy per CPU loading. --affinity-rand switch CPU affinity randomly rather than the default of se- quentially. --affinity-sleep N sleep for N nanoseconds before changing affinity to the next CPU. Kernel crypto AF_ALG API stressor --af-alg N start N workers that exercise the AF_ALG socket domain by hashing and encrypting various sized random messages. This exercises the available hashes, ciphers, rng and aead crypto engines in the Linux kernel. --af-alg-dump dump the internal list representing cryptographic algo- rithms parsed from the /proc/crypto file to standard output (stdout). --af-alg-ops N stop af-alg workers after N AF_ALG messages are hashed. Asynchronous I/O stressor (POSIX AIO) --aio N start N workers that issue multiple small asynchronous I/O writes and reads on a relatively small temporary file using the POSIX aio interface. This will just hit the file sys- tem cache and soak up a lot of user and kernel time in is- suing and handling I/O requests. By default, each worker process will handle 16 concurrent I/O requests. --aio-ops N stop POSIX asynchronous I/O workers after N bogo asynchro- nous I/O requests. --aio-requests N specify the number of POSIX asynchronous I/O requests each worker should issue, the default is 16; 1 to 4096 are al- lowed. Asynchronous I/O stressor (Linux AIO) --aiol N start N workers that issue multiple 4 K random asynchronous I/O writes using the Linux aio system calls io_setup(2), io_submit(2), io_getevents(2) and io_destroy(2). By de- fault, each worker process will handle 16 concurrent I/O requests. --aiol-ops N stop Linux asynchronous I/O workers after N bogo asynchro- nous I/O requests. --aiol-requests N specify the number of Linux asynchronous I/O requests each worker should issue, the default is 16; 1 to 4096 are al- lowed. Alarm stressor --alarm N start N workers that exercise alarm(2) with MAXINT, 0 and random alarm and sleep delays that get prematurely inter- rupted. Before each alarm is scheduled any previous pending alarms are cancelled with zero second alarm calls. --alarm-ops N stop after N alarm bogo operations. AppArmor stressor --apparmor N start N workers that exercise various parts of the AppArmor interface. Currently one needs root permission to run this particular test. Only available on Linux systems with Ap- pArmor support and requires the CAP_MAC_ADMIN capability. --apparmor-ops stop the AppArmor workers after N bogo operations. Atomic stressor --atomic N start N workers that exercise various GCC __atomic_*() built in operations on 8, 16, 32 and 64 bit integers that are shared among the N workers. This stressor is only available for builds using GCC 4.7.4 or higher. The stres- sor forces many front end cache stalls and cache refer- ences. Note that 32 bit systems do not currently exercise 64 bit integers. --atomic-ops N stop the atomic workers after N bogo atomic operations. Bad alternative stack stressor --bad-altstack N start N workers that create broken alternative signal stacks for SIGSEGV and SIGBUS handling that in turn create secondary SIGSEGV/SIGBUS errors. A variety of randomly se- lected nefarious methods are used to create the stacks: • Unmapping the alternative signal stack, before triggering the signal handling. • Changing the alternative signal stack to just being read only, write only, execute only. • Using a NULL alternative signal stack. • Using the signal handler object as the alternative signal stack. • Unmapping the alternative signal stack during execution of the signal handler. • Using a read-only text segment for the alternative signal stack. • Using an undersized alternative signal stack. • Using the VDSO as an alternative signal stack. • Using an alternative stack mapped onto /dev/zero. • Using an alternative stack mapped to a zero sized tempo- rary file to generate a SIGBUS error. --bad-altstack-ops N stop the bad alternative stack stressors after N SIGSEGV bogo operations. Bad ioctl stressor --bad-ioctl N start N workers that perform a range of illegal bad read ioctl(2) calls (using _IOR) and write ioctls (using _IOR with PROT_NONE mapped pages) across the device drivers. This exercises page size, 64 bit, 32 bit, 16 bit and 8 bit reads as well as NULL addresses, non-readable pages and PROT_NONE mapped pages. Currently only for Linux and re- quires the --pathological option. --bad-ioctl-method [ inc | random | random-inc | stride ] select the method of changing the ioctl command (number, type) tuple per iteration, the default is random-inc. Available bad-ioctl methods are described as follows: Method Description inc increment ioctl command by 1 random use a random ioctl command random-inc increment ioctl command by a random value random-stride increment ioctl command number by 1 and decrement command type by 3 --bad-ioctl-ops N stop the bad ioctl stressors after N bogo ioctl operations. Bessel functions --besselmath N start N workers that exercise various Bessel functions. Results are sanity checked to ensure no variation occurs after each round of 10000 computations. --besselmath-ops N stop after N bessel bogo-operation loops. --besselmath-method method specify a Bessel function to exercise. Available bessel stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below Bessel functions methods j0 double precision Bessel function of the first kind of order 0 j1 double precision Bessel function of the first kind of order 1 jn double precision Bessel function of the first kind of order n (where n = 5 for this test) j0f float precision Bessel function of the first kind of order 0 j1f float precision Bessel function of the first kind of order 1 jnf float precision Bessel function of the first kind of order n (where n = 5 for this test) j0l long double precision Bessel function of the first kind of order 0 j1l long double precision Bessel function of the first kind of order 1 jnl long double precision Bessel function of the first kind of order n (where n = 5 for this test) y0 double precision Bessel function of the second kind of order 0 y1 youble precision Bessel function of the second kind of order 1 yn double precision Bessel function of the second kind of order n (where n = 5 for this test) y0f float precision Bessel function of the second kind of order 0 y1f float precision Bessel function of the second kind of order 1 ynf float precision Bessel function of the second kind of order n (where n = 5 for this test) y0l long double precision Bessel function of the second kind of order 0 y1l long double precision Bessel function of the second kind of order 1 ynl long double precision Bessel function of the second kind of order n (where n = 5 for this test) Big heap stressor -B N, --bigheap N start N workers that grow their heaps by reallocating mem- ory. If the out of memory killer (OOM) on Linux kills the worker or the allocation fails then the allocating process starts all over again. Note that the OOM adjustment for the worker is set so that the OOM killer will treat these workers as the first candidate processes to kill. --bigheap-bytes N maximum heap growth as N bytes per bigheap worker. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --bigheap-growth N specify amount of memory to grow heap by per iteration. Size can be from 4 K to 64 MB. Default is 64 K. --bigheap-mlock attempt to mlock(2) future allocated pages into memory causing more memory pressure. If mlock(MCL_FUTURE) is im- plemented then this will stop newly allocated pages from being swapped out. --bigheap-ops N stop the big heap workers after N bogo allocation opera- tions are completed. Binderfs stressor --binderfs N start N workers that mount, exercise and unmount binderfs. The binder control device is exercised with 256 sequential BINDER_CTL_ADD ioctl(2) calls per loop. --binderfs-ops N stop after N binderfs cycles. Bind mount stressor --bind-mount N start N workers that repeatedly bind mount / to / inside a user namespace. This can consume resources rapidly, forcing out of memory situations. Do not use this stressor unless you want to risk hanging your machine. --bind-mount-ops N stop after N bind mount bogo operations. Bitonic sort stressor --bitonicsort N start N workers that sort 32 bit integers using bitonic sort. --bitonicsort-ops N stop bitonic sort stress workers after N bogo bitonic sorts. --bitonicsort-size N specify number of 32 bit integers to sort, default is 262144 (256 x 1024). Bit Manipulation Operations --bitops N start N workers that perform various calculations using 32 bit integer manipulation operations. Many of these are de- rived from the Standford "Bit Twiddling Hacks" (Sean Eron Anderson) and Hacker's Delight (Henry S. Warren, Jr.) --bitops-ops N stop after N bitop operations. --bitops-method method specify bitops stress method. By default, all the bitops stress methods are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one method to be used if required. Available bitops stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below bitops stress meth- ods. abs calculate the absolute value of a 32 bit signed integer. Computed two different ways, one with masking and addition, one with masking and sub- traction. countbits count the number of bits set to 1 in a 32 bit unsigned integer. Computed six different ways, two with bit counting, one with 64 bit multipli- cation, one with parallelised masking and shift- ing, one using triple masking and shifts, one using a builtin popcount function. clz count the number of leading zero bits in a 32 bit unsigned integer. Computed four different ways, one with bit counting, one with log2 shifting, one using a builtin popcount function, one using a builtin clz function, ctz count the number of trailing zero bits in a 32 bit unsigned integer. Computed five different ways, one with bit cointing, one using masking and shifting, one using the masking and ternary operator Gaudet method, one using a builtin clz function, one using a builtin popcount function. cmp compare two 32 bit unsigned integers with com- parison results of -1, 0, 1 for less than, equal or greater than. Computed 3 ways, one using sim- ple comparisons, two using comparisons and sub- traction. log2 calculate log base 2 of a 32 bit unsigned inte- ger. Computed four ways, one using bit counting, one using masking and shifting and branching, one using masking and shifting with no branch- ing, one using shifting and bitwise or'ing. max find the maximum of two 32 bit unsigned integers without a temporary variable. Computed two ways, one using xor'ing and masking, one using the ternary operator. min find the minimum of two 32 bit unsigned integers without a temporary variable. Computed two ways, one using xor'ing and masking, one using the ternary operator. parity compute the parity of a 32 bit unsigned integer. Computed five ways, two using bit counting, one using multiplication, shifting and xor'ing, one using shifting and xor'ing, one using a builtin parity function. pwr2 determine if a 32 bit unsigned integer is a power of 2. Computed using bit counting and with mask of value - 1. rnddnpwr2 find the nearest power of 2 of a 32 bit unsigned integer, rounded down. Computed three ways, one using bit counting and shifting, one using shifting and or'ing, one using a shift and the builtin ctz function. rnduppwr2 find the nearest power of 2 of a 32 bit unsigned integer, rounded up. Computed three ways, one using bit counting and shifting, one using shifting and or'ing, one using a shift and the builtin ctz function. reverse reverse the bits of a 32 bit unsigned integer. Computed six ways, one using bit shifting loop, one using bit shitting and mask loop, one using parallelised masking and shifting, one using 64 bit multiplication, one using 32 bit multiplica- tion, one using the builtin bitreverse32 func- tion. sign calculate the sign of a 32 bit signed integer. Computed two ways, one using a branchless less than zero operator, one using sign bit shifting and negation. swap swap two 32 bit signed integers without a tempo- rary variable. Computed two ways, one using sub- traction and addition, one using xor'ing. zerobyte determine of a 32 bit unsigned integer contains one or more zero bytes. Computed two ways, one with per byte zero checking, one using bit mask- ing. Branch stressor --branch N start N workers that randomly branch to 1024 randomly se- lected locations and hence exercise the CPU branch predic- tion logic. --branch-ops N stop the branch stressors after N x 1024 branches Brk stressor --brk N start N workers that grow the data segment by one page at a time using multiple brk(2) calls. Each successfully allo- cated new page is touched to ensure it is resident in mem- ory. If an out of memory condition occurs then the test will reset the data segment to the point before it started and repeat the data segment resizing over again. The process adjusts the out of memory setting so that it may be killed by the out of memory (OOM) killer before other processes. If it is killed by the OOM killer then it will be automatically re-started by a monitoring parent process. --brk-bytes N maximum brk growth as N bytes per brk worker. One can spec- ify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --brk-mlock attempt to mlock(2) future brk pages into memory causing more memory pressure. If mlock(MCL_FUTURE) is implemented then this will stop new brk pages from being swapped out. --brk-notouch do not touch each newly allocated data segment page. This disables the default of touching each newly allocated page and hence avoids the kernel from necessarily backing the page with physical memory. --brk-ops N stop the brk workers after N bogo brk operations. Binary search stressor --bsearch N start N workers that binary search a sorted array of 32 bit integers using bsearch(3). By default, there are 65536 ele- ments in the array. This is a useful method to exercise random access of memory and processor cache. --bsearch-method [ bsearch-libc | bsearch-nonlibc | ternary ] select either the libc implementation of bsearch or a slightly optimized non-libc implementation of bsearch or a 3-day ternary search. The default is the libc implementa- tion if it exists, otherwise the non-libc version. --bsearch-ops N stop the bsearch worker after N bogo bsearch operations are completed. --bsearch-size N specify the size (number of 32 bit integers) in the array to bsearch. Size can be from 1 K to 64 M. bubblesort stressor --bubblesort N start N workers that sort 32 bit integers using bubblesort. --bubblesort-method [ bubblesort-fast | bubblesort-naive ] select either a standard optimized implementation of bub- blesort or a naive unoptimized implementation of bubble- sort. The default is the standard optimized version. --bubblesort-ops N stop bubblesort stress workers after N bogo bubblesorts. --bubblesort-size N specify number of 32 bit integers to sort, default is 16384. Cache stressor -C N, --cache N start N workers that perform random wide spread memory read and writes to thrash the CPU cache. The code does not in- telligently determine the CPU cache configuration and so it may be sub-optimal in producing hit-miss read/write activ- ity for some processors. Note: to exercise cache misses it is recommended to instead use the matrix-3d stressor using the --matrix-3d-zyx option. --cache-cldemote cache line demote (x86 only). This is a no-op for non-x86 architectures and older x86 processors that do not support this feature. --cache-clflushopt use optimized cache line flush (x86 only). This is a no-op for non-x86 architectures and older x86 processors that do not support this feature. --cache-clwb cache line writeback (x86 only). This is a no-op for non- x86 architectures and older x86 processors that do not sup- port this feature. --cache-enable-all where appropriate exercise the cache using cldemote, clflushopt, fence, flush, sfence and prefetch. --cache-fence force write serialization on each store operation (x86 only). This is a no-op for non-x86 architectures. --cache-flush force flush cache on each store operation (x86 only). This is a no-op for non-x86 architectures. --cache-level N specify level of cache to exercise (1 = L1 cache, 2 = L2 cache, 3 = L3/LLC cache (the default)). If the cache hier- archy cannot be determined, built-in defaults will apply. --cache-no-affinity do not change processor affinity when --cache is in effect. --cache-ops N stop cache thrash workers after N bogo cache thrash opera- tions. --cache-permute permute the selected cache flags when exercising cache for an improved mix of cache operations. Recommend also using --cache-enable-all with this option. --cache-prefetch force read prefetch on read address on architectures that support prefetching. --cache-prefetchw force a redundant write prefetch on architectures that sup- port write prefetching. --cache-sfence force write serialization on each store operation using the sfence instruction (x86 only). This is a no-op for non-x86 architectures. --cache-size N override the default cache size setting to N bytes. One can specify the in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --cache-ways N specify the number of cache ways to exercise. This allows a subset of the overall cache size to be exercised. Cache hammering stessor --cachehammer N start N workers that exercise the cache with a randomized mix of memory read/writes and where possible cache prefetches and cache flushes to random addresses in three memory mapped regions, one of which is shared among all the cache stressors and is the size of the L3 cache, one is lo- cal to each instance and is 4 times the L3 cache size and one is a single page mapping that cannot be read or writ- ten. --cachehammer-numa periodically assign exercised pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not sup- port NUMA. --cachehammer-ops N stop after N cache hammer operations. Cache line stressor --cacheline N start N workers that exercise reading and writing individ- ual bytes in a shared buffer that is the size of a cache line. Each stressor will run 1 or more processes to exer- cise bytes that are next to each other. The number of per stressor processes run will be scaled so that at least all N bytes of a N byte cache line are exercised. The intent is to try and trigger cacheline corruption, stalls and misses with shared memory accesses. --cacheline-affinity frequently change CPU affinity, spread cacheline processes evenly across all online CPUs to try and maximize lower- level cache activity. Attempts to keep adjacent cachelines being exercised by adjacent CPUs. --cacheline-method method specify a cacheline stress method. By default, all the stress methods are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one method to be used if required. Available cacheline stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below cpu stress methods. adjacent increment a specific byte in a cacheline and read the adjacent byte, check for corruption every 7 increments. atomicinc atomically increment a specific byte in a cache- line and check for corruption every 7 incre- ments. bits write and read back shifted bit patterns into specific byte in a cacheline and check for cor- ruption. copy copy an adjacent byte to a specific byte in a cacheline. inc increment and read back a specific byte in a cacheline and check for corruption every 7 in- crements. mix perform a mix of increment, left and right ro- tates a specific byte in a cacheline and check for corruption. rdfwd64 increment a specific byte in a cacheline and then read in forward direction an entire cache- line using 64 bit reads. rdints increment a specific byte in a cacheline and then read data at that byte location in natu- rally aligned locations integer values of size 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 bits. rdrev64 increment a specific byte in a cacheline and then read in reverse direction an entire cache- line using 64 bit reads. rdwr read and write the same 8 bit value into a spe- cific byte in a cacheline and check for corrup- tion. --cacheline-ops N stop cacheline workers after N loops of the byte exercising in a cacheline. Process capabilities stressor --cap N start N workers that read per process capabilities via calls to capget(2) (Linux only). --cap-ops N stop after N cap bogo operations. Cgroup stressor --cgroup N start N workers that mount a cgroup, move a child to the cgroup, read, write and remove the child from the cgroup and umount the cgroup per bogo-op iteration. This uses cgroup v2 and is only available for Linux systems. --cgroup-ops N stop after N cgroup bogo operations. Chattr stressor --chattr N start N workers that attempt to exercise file attributes via the EXT2_IOC_SETFLAGS ioctl(2). This is intended to be intentionally racy and exercise a range of chattr attrib- utes by enabling and disabling them on a file shared amongst the N chattr stressor processes. (Linux only). --chattr-ops N stop after N chattr bogo operations. Chdir stressor --chdir N start N workers that change directory between directories using chdir(2). --chdir-dirs N exercise chdir on N directories. The default is 8192 direc- tories, this allows 64 to 65536 directories to be used in- stead. --chdir-ops N stop after N chdir bogo operations. Chmod stressor --chmod N start N workers that change the file mode bits via chmod(2) and fchmod(2) on the same file. The greater the value for N then the more contention on the single file. The stressor will work through all the combination of mode bits. --chmod-ops N stop after N chmod bogo operations. Chown stressor --chown N start N workers that exercise chown(2) on the same file. The greater the value for N then the more contention on the single file. --chown-ops N stop the chown workers after N bogo chown(2) operations. Chroot stressor --chroot N start N workers that exercise chroot(2) on various valid and invalid chroot paths. Only available on Linux systems and requires the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability. --chroot-ops N stop the chroot workers after N bogo chroot(2) operations. Complex hyperbolic functions stressor --chyperbolic N start N workers that exercise complex sinh, cosh, and tanh libm complex hyperbolic functions using complex float, com- plex double and complex long double floating point vari- ants. Each function is exercised 10000 times per bogo-oper- ation. --chyperbolic-method function specify a complex hyperbolic stress function. By default, all the functions are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one function to be used if required. Available options are as follows: Method Description all iterate through all of the following complex hy- perbolic functions ccosh complex hyperbolic cosine (complex double preci- sion) ccoshf complex hyperbolic cosine (complex float preci- sion) ccoshl complex hyperbolic cosine (complex long double precision) csinh complex hyperbolic sine (complex double precision) csinhf complex hyperbolic sine (complex float precision) csinhl complex hyperbolic sine (complex long double pre- cision) ctanh complex hyperbolic tangent (complex double preci- sion) ctanhf complex hyperbolic tangent (complex float preci- sion) ctanhl complex hyperbolic tangent (complex long double precision) --chyperbolic-ops N stop after N bogo-operations. Clock stressor --clock N start N workers exercising clocks and POSIX timers. For all known clock types this will exercise clock_getres(2), clock_gettime(2) and clock_nanosleep(2). For all known timers it will create a random duration timer and busy poll this until it expires. This stressor will cause frequent context switching. --clock-ops N stop clock stress workers after N bogo operations. Clone stressor --clone N start N workers that create clones (via the clone(2) and clone3(2) system calls). This will rapidly try to create a default of 8192 clones that immediately die and wait in a zombie state until they are reaped. Once the maximum num- ber of clones is reached (or clone fails because one has reached the maximum allowed) the oldest clone thread is reaped and a new clone is then created in a first-in first- out manner, and then repeated. A random clone flag is se- lected for each clone to try to exercise different clone operations. The clone stressor is a Linux only option. --clone-max N try to create as many as N clone threads. This may not be reached if the system limit is less than N. --clone-ops N stop clone stress workers after N bogo clone operations. Close stressor --close N start N workers that try to force race conditions on clos- ing opened file descriptors. These file descriptors have been opened in various ways to try and exercise different kernel close handlers. --close-ops N stop close workers after N bogo close operations. Swapcontext stressor --context N start N workers that run three threads that use swapcon- text(3) to implement the thread-to-thread context switch- ing. This exercises rapid process context saving and restoring and is bandwidth limited by register and memory save and restore rates. --context-ops N stop context workers after N bogo context switches. In this stressor, 1 bogo op is equivalent to 1000 swapcontext calls. Copy file stressor --copy-file N start N stressors that copy a file using the Linux copy_file_range(2) system call. 128 KB chunks of data are copied from random locations from one file to random loca- tions to a destination file. By default, the files are 256 MB in size. Data is sync'd to the filesystem after each copy_file_range(2) call. --copy-file-bytes N copy file size, the default is 256 MB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --copy-file-ops N stop after N copy_file_range() calls. CPU stressor -c N, --cpu N start N workers exercising the CPU by sequentially working through all the different CPU stress methods. Instead of exercising all the CPU stress methods, one can specify a specific CPU stress method with the --cpu-method option. -l P, --cpu-load P load CPU with P percent loading for the CPU stress workers. 0 is effectively a sleep (no load) and 100 is full loading. The loading loop is broken into compute time (load%) and sleep time (100% - load%). Accuracy depends on the overall load of the processor and the responsiveness of the sched- uler, so the actual load may be different from the desired load. Note that the number of bogo CPU operations may not be linearly scaled with the load as some systems employ CPU frequency scaling and so heavier loads produce an increased CPU frequency and greater CPU bogo operations. Note: This option only applies to the --cpu stressor option and not to all of the cpu class of stressors. --cpu-load-slice S note: this option is only useful when --cpu-load is less than 100%. The CPU load is broken into multiple busy and idle cycles. Use this option to specify the duration of a busy time slice. A negative value for S specifies the num- ber of iterations to run before idling the CPU (e.g. -30 invokes 30 iterations of a CPU stress loop). A zero value selects a random busy time between 0 and 0.5 seconds. A positive value for S specifies the number of milliseconds to run before idling the CPU (e.g. 100 keeps the CPU busy for 0.1 seconds). Specifying small values for S lends to small time slices and smoother scheduling. Setting --cpu-load as a relatively low value and --cpu-load-slice to be large will cycle the CPU between long idle and busy cycles and exercise different CPU frequencies. The thermal range of the CPU is also cycled, so this is a good mecha- nism to exercise the scheduler, frequency scaling and pas- sive/active thermal cooling mechanisms. Note: This option only applies to the --cpu stressor option and not to all of the cpu class of stressors. --cpu-method method specify a cpu stress method. By default, all the stress methods are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one method to be used if required. Available cpu stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below cpu stress methods ackermann Ackermann function: compute A(3, 7), where: A(m, n) = n + 1 if m = 0; A(m - 1, 1) if m > 0 and n = 0; A(m - 1, A(m, n - 1)) if m > 0 and n > 0 For other recursive methods, refer to the hanoi cpu stress method. apery calculate Apery's constant <zeta>(3); the sum of 1/(n ^ 3) to a precision of 1.0x10^14 bitops various bit operations from bithack, namely: reverse bits, parity check, bit count, round to nearest power of 2 callfunc recursively call 8 argument C function to a depth of 1024 calls and unwind cfloat 1000 iterations of a mix of floating point complex operations cdouble 1000 iterations of a mix of double float- ing point complex operations clongdouble 1000 iterations of a mix of long double floating point complex operations collatz compute the 1348 steps in the collatz se- quence starting from number 989345275647. Where f(n) = n / 2 (for even n) and f(n) = 3n + 1 (for odd n). correlate perform a 8192 x 512 correlation of ran- dom doubles crc16 compute 1024 rounds of CCITT CRC16 on random data decimal32 1000 iterations of a mix of 32 bit deci- mal floating point operations (GCC only) decimal64 1000 iterations of a mix of 64 bit deci- mal floating point operations (GCC only) decimal128 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit deci- mal floating point operations (GCC only) dither Floyd-Steinberg dithering of a 1024 x 768 random image from 8 bits down to 1 bit of depth div8 50000 8 bit unsigned integer divisions div16 50000 16 bit unsigned integer divisions div32 50000 32 bit unsigned integer divisions div64 50000 64 bit unsigned integer divisions div128 50000 128 bit unsigned integer divisions double 1000 iterations of a mix of double preci- sion floating point operations euler compute e using n = (1 + (1 / n)) ^ n explog iterate on n = exp(log(n) / 1.00002) factorial find factorials from 1..150 using Stir- ling's and Ramanujan's approximations fibonacci compute Fibonacci sequence of 0, 1, 1, 2, 5, 8... fft 4096 sample Fast Fourier Transform fletcher16 1024 rounds of a naive implementation of a 16 bit Fletcher's checksum float 1000 iterations of a mix of floating point operations float16 1000 iterations of a mix of 16 bit float- ing point operations float32 1000 iterations of a mix of 32 bit float- ing point operations float64 1000 iterations of a mix of 64 bit float- ing point operations float80 1000 iterations of a mix of 80 bit float- ing point operations float128 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit floating point operations floatconversion perform 65536 iterations of floating point conversions between float, double and long double floating point variables. gamma calculate the Euler-Mascheroni constant <gamma> using the limiting difference be- tween the harmonic series (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 ... + 1/n) and the natural logarithm ln(n), for n = 80000. gcd compute GCD of integers gray calculate binary to gray code and gray code back to binary for integers from 0 to 65535 hamming compute Hamming H(8,4) codes on 262144 lots of 4 bit data. This turns 4 bit data into 8 bit Hamming code containing 4 par- ity bits. For data bits d1..d4, parity bits are computed as: p1 = d2 + d3 + d4 p2 = d1 + d3 + d4 p3 = d1 + d2 + d4 p4 = d1 + d2 + d3 hanoi solve a 21 disc Towers of Hanoi stack us- ing the recursive solution. For other re- cursive methods, refer to the ackermann cpu stress method. hyperbolic compute sinh(<theta>) x cosh(<theta>) + sinh(2<theta>) + cosh(3<theta>) for float, double and long double hyperbolic sine and cosine functions where <theta> = 0 to 2<pi> in 1500 steps idct 8 x 8 IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform). int8 1000 iterations of a mix of 8 bit integer operations. int16 1000 iterations of a mix of 16 bit inte- ger operations. int32 1000 iterations of a mix of 32 bit inte- ger operations. int64 1000 iterations of a mix of 64 bit inte- ger operations. int128 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit inte- ger operations (GCC only). int32float 1000 iterations of a mix of 32 bit inte- ger and floating point operations. int32double 1000 iterations of a mix of 32 bit inte- ger and double precision floating point operations. int32longdouble 1000 iterations of a mix of 32 bit inte- ger and long double precision floating point operations. int64float 1000 iterations of a mix of 64 bit inte- ger and floating point operations. int64double 1000 iterations of a mix of 64 bit inte- ger and double precision floating point operations. int64longdouble 1000 iterations of a mix of 64 bit inte- ger and long double precision floating point operations. int128float 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit inte- ger and floating point operations (GCC only). int128double 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit inte- ger and double precision floating point operations (GCC only). int128longdouble 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit inte- ger and long double precision floating point operations (GCC only). int128decimal32 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit inte- ger and 32 bit decimal floating point op- erations (GCC only). int128decimal64 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit inte- ger and 64 bit decimal floating point op- erations (GCC only). int128decimal128 1000 iterations of a mix of 128 bit inte- ger and 128 bit decimal floating point operations (GCC only). intconversion perform 65536 iterations of integer con- versions between int16, int32 and int64 variables. ipv4checksum compute 1024 rounds of the 16 bit ones' complement IPv4 checksum. jmp Simple unoptimised compare >, <, == and jmp branching. lfsr32 16384 iterations of a 32 bit Galois lin- ear feedback shift register using the polynomial x^32 + x^31 + x^29 + x + 1. This generates a ring of 2^32 - 1 unique values (all 32 bit values except for 0). ln2 compute ln(2) based on series: 1 - 1/2 + 1/3 - 1/4 + 1/5 - 1/6 ... logmap 16384 iterations computing chaotic double precision values using the logistic map Xn+1 = r x Xn x (1 - Xn) where r > ~ 3.56994567 longdouble 1000 iterations of a mix of long double precision floating point operations. loop simple empty loop. matrixprod matrix product of two 128 x 128 matrices of double floats. Testing on 64 bit x86 hardware shows that this is provides a good mix of memory, cache and floating point operations and is probably the best CPU method to use to make a CPU run hot. nsqrt compute sqrt() of long doubles using New- ton-Raphson. omega compute the omega constant defined by <Omega>e^<Omega> = 1 using efficient it- eration of <Omega>n+1 = (1 + <Omega>n) / (1 + e^<Omega>n). parity compute parity using various methods from the Standford Bit Twiddling Hacks. Meth- ods employed are: the naive way, the naive way with the Brian Kernigan bit counting optimisation, the multiply way, the parallel way, the lookup table ways (2 variations) and using the __builtin_parity(3) function. phi compute the Golden Ratio <phi> using se- ries. pi compute <pi> using the Srinivasa Ramanu- jan fast convergence algorithm. prime find the first 10000 prime numbers using a slightly optimised brute force naive trial division search. psi compute <psi> (the reciprocal Fibonacci constant) using the sum of the recipro- cals of the Fibonacci numbers. queens compute all the solutions of the classic 8 queens problem for board sizes 1..11. rand 16384 iterations of rand(), where rand is the MWC pseudo random number generator. The MWC random function concatenates two 16 bit multiply-with-carry generators: x(n) = 36969 x x(n - 1) + carry, y(n) = 18000 x y(n - 1) + carry mod 2 ^ 16 and has period of around 2 ^ 60. rand48 16384 iterations of drand48(3) and lrand48(3). rgb convert RGB to YUV and back to RGB (CCIR 601). sieve find the first 10000 prime numbers using the sieve of Eratosthenes. stats calculate minimum, maximum, arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmoninc mean and standard deviation on 250 randomly gener- ated positive double precision values. sqrt compute sqrt(rand()), where rand is the MWC pseudo random number generator. trig compute sin(<theta>) x cos(<theta>) + sin(2<theta>) + cos(3<theta>) for float, double and long double sine and cosine functions where <theta> = 0 to 2<pi> in 1500 steps. union perform integer arithmetic on a mix of bit fields in a C union. This exercises how well the compiler and CPU can perform integer bit field loads and stores. zeta compute the Riemann Zeta function <zeta>(s) for s = 2.0..10.0 Note that some of these methods try to exercise the CPU with computations found in some real world use cases. How- ever, the code has not been optimised on a per-architecture basis, so may be a sub-optimal compared to hand-optimised code used in some applications. They do try to represent the typical instruction mixes found in these use cases. --cpu-old-metrics as of version V0.14.02 the cpu stressor now normalizes each of the cpu stressor method bogo-op counters to try and en- sure a similar bogo-op rate for all the methods to avoid the shorter running (and faster) methods from skewing the bogo-op rates when using the default "all" method. This is based on a reference Intel i5-8350U processor and hence the bogo-ops normalizing factors will be skew somewhat on dif- ferent CPUs, but so significantly as the original bogo-op counter rates. To disable the normalization and fall back to the original metrics, use this option. --cpu-ops N stop cpu stress workers after N bogo operations. CPU onlining stressor --cpu-online N start N workers that put randomly selected CPUs offline and online. This Linux only stressor requires root privilege to perform this action. By default the first CPU (CPU 0) is never offlined as this has been found to be problematic on some systems and can result in a shutdown. --cpu-online-affinity move the stressor worker to the CPU that will be next of- flined. --cpu-online-all The default is to never offline the first CPU. This option will offline and online all the CPUs including CPU 0. This may cause some systems to shutdown. --cpu-online-ops N stop after offline/online operations. CPU affinity scheduler stressor --cpu-sched N start N workers that exercise the scheduler by moving processes to different CPUs. Each worker starts 16 child processes and repeatedly moves the processes to different CPUs and attempts changes their scheduler policy using SCHED_OTHER, SCHED_BATCH, SCHED_IDLE, SCHED_EXT, SCHED_DEADLINE, SCHED_RR and SCHED_FIFO policies. The choice of CPU placement is based on 8 different mechanisms and is changed every second to mix process placements on all the available CPUS. The child processes are run with randomizied nice settings to exercise scheduler prioritiza- tion. --cpu-sched-ops N stop after N child process move attempts. Crypt stressor --crypt N start N workers that encrypt a 16 character random password using crypt(3). The password is encrypted using bcrypt bs- dicrypt descrypt gost-yescrypt MD5 NT scrypt SHA-1 SHA-256 SHA-512 SunMD5 and yescrypt encryption methods. --crypt-method method select the encryption method, may be one of: bcrypt, bs- dicrypt, descrypt, gost-yescrypt, MD5, NT, scrypt, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, SunMD5 and yescrypt. The `all' method selects all the methods and is the default. --crypt-ops N stop after N bogo encryption operations. Complex trigonometric functions stressor --ctrig N start N workers that exercise complex sin, complex cos and complex tan libm trigonometric functions using complex float, complex double and complex long double floating point variants. Each function is exercised 10000 times per bogo-operation. --ctrig-method function specify a trigonometric stress function. By default, all the functions are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one function to be used if required. Avail- able options are as follows: Method Description all iterate through all of the following complex trigonometric functions ccos complex cosine (complex double precision) ccosf complex cosine (complex float precision) ccosl complex cosine (complex long double precision) csin complex sine (complex double precision) csinf complex sine (complex float precision) csinl complex sine (complex long double precision) ctan complex tangent (complex double precision) ctanf complex tangent (complex float precision) ctanl complex tangent (complex long double precision) Cyclic stressor --cyclic N start N workers that exercise schedulers with cyclic nanosecond sleeps. Normally one would just use 1 worker in- stance with this stressor to get reliable statistics. By default this stressor measures the first 10 thousand laten- cies and calculates the mean, mode, minimum, maximum laten- cies along with various latency percentiles for the just the first cyclic stressor instance. One has to run this stressor with CAP_SYS_NICE capability to enable the real time scheduling policies. The FIFO scheduling policy is the default. --cyclic-dist N calculate and print a latency distribution with the inter- val of N nanoseconds. This is helpful to see where the la- tencies are clustering. --cyclic-method [ clock_ns | itimer | poll | posix_ns | pselect | usleep ] specify the cyclic method to be used, the default is clock_ns. The available cyclic methods are as follows: Method Description clock_ns sleep for the specified time using the clock_nanosleep(2) high resolution nanosleep and the CLOCK_REALTIME real time clock. itimer wakeup a paused process with a CLOCK_REALTIME itimer signal. poll delay for the specified time using a poll delay loop that checks for time changes using clock_gettime(2) on the CLOCK_REALTIME clock. posix_ns sleep for the specified time using the POSIX nanosleep(2) high resolution nanosleep. pselect sleep for the specified time using pselect(2) with null file descriptors. usleep sleep to the nearest microsecond using usleep(2). --cyclic-ops N stop after N sleeps. --cyclic-policy [ batch | deadline | ext | fifo | idle| other | rr ] specify the desired scheduling policy; batch, deadline, ext, fifo (first-in, first-out) idle, other or rr (round-robin). --cyclic-prio P specify the scheduling priority P. Range from 1 (lowest) to 100 (highest). --cyclic-samples N measure N samples. Range from 1 to 100000000 samples. --cyclic-sleep N sleep for N nanoseconds per test cycle using clock_nanosleep(2) with the CLOCK_REALTIME timer. Range from 1 to 1000000000 nanoseconds. Daemon stressor --daemon N start N workers that each create a daemon that dies immedi- ately after creating another daemon and so on. This effec- tively works through the process table with short lived processes that do not have a parent and are waited for by init. This puts pressure on init to do rapid child reap- ing. The daemon processes perform the usual mix of calls to turn into typical UNIX daemons, so this artificially mimics very heavy daemon system stress. --daemon-ops N stop daemon workers after N daemons have been created. --daemon-wait wait for daemon child processes rather than let init handle the waiting. Enabling this option will reduce the daemon fork rate because of the synchronous wait delays. Datagram congestion control protocol (DCCP) stressor --dccp N start N workers that send and receive data using the Data- gram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) (RFC4340). This in- volves a pair of client/server processes performing rapid connect, send and receives and disconnects on the local host. --dccp-domain D specify the domain to use, the default is ipv4. Currently ipv4 and ipv6 are supported. --dccp-if NAME use network interface NAME. If the interface NAME does not exist, is not up or does not support the domain then the loopback (lo) interface is used as the default. --dccp-msgs N send N messages per connect, send/receive, disconnect iter- ation. The default is 10000 messages. If N is too small then the rate is throttled back by the overhead of dccp socket connect and disconnects. --dccp-port P start DCCP at port P. For N dccp worker processes, ports P to P - 1 are used. --dccp-ops N stop dccp stress workers after N bogo operations. --dccp-opts [ send | sendmsg | sendmmsg ] by default, messages are sent using send(2). This option allows one to specify the sending method using send(2), sendmsg(2) or sendmmsg(2). Note that sendmmsg is only available for Linux systems that support this system call. Mutex using Dekker algorithm stressor --dekker N start N workers that exercises mutex exclusion between two processes using shared memory with the Dekker Algorithm. Where possible this uses memory fencing and falls back to using GCC __sync_synchronize if they are not available. The stressors contain simple mutex and memory coherency sanity checks. --dekker-ops N stop dekker workers after N mutex operations. Dentry stressor -D N, --dentry N start N workers that create and remove directory entries. This should create file system meta data activity. The di- rectory entry names are suffixed by a gray-code encoded number to try to mix up the hashing of the namespace. --dentry-ops N stop denty thrash workers after N bogo dentry operations. --dentry-order [ forward | reverse | stride | random ] specify unlink order of dentries, can be one of forward, reverse, stride or random. By default, dentries are un- linked in random order. The forward order will unlink them from first to last, reverse order will unlink them from last to first, stride order will unlink them by stepping around order in a quasi-random pattern and random order will randomly select one of forward, reverse or stride or- ders. --dentries N create N dentries per dentry thrashing loop, default is 2048. /dev stressor --dev N start N workers that exercise the /dev devices. Each worker runs 5 concurrent threads that perform open(2), fstat(2), lseek(2), poll(2), fcntl(2), mmap(2), munmap(2), fsync(2) and close(2) on each device. Note that watchdog devices are not exercised. --dev-file filename specify the device file to exercise, for example, /dev/null. By default the stressor will work through all the device files it can fine, however, this option allows a single device file to be exercised. --dev-ops N stop dev workers after N bogo device exercising operations. /dev/shm stressor --dev-shm N start N workers that fallocate large files in /dev/shm and then mmap these into memory and touch all the pages. This exercises pages being moved to/from the buffer cache. Linux only. --dev-shm-ops N stop after N bogo allocation and mmap /dev/shm operations. Decimal floating point operations stressor --dfp N start N workers that exercise addition, multiplication and division operations on a range of decimal floating point types. For each type, 8 floating point values are operated upon 65536 times in a loop per bogo op. --dfp-method method select the decimal floating point method to use, available methods are: Method Description all iterate over all the following floating point methods: df32add 32 bit decimal floating point addition (_Decimal32) df64add 64 bit decimal floating point addition (_Decimal64) df128add 128 bit decimal floating point addition (_Decimal128) df32sub 32 bit decimal floating point subtraction (_Decimal32) df64sub 64 bit decimal floating point subtraction (_Decimal64) df128sub 128 bit decimal floating point subtraction (_Decimal128) df32mul 32 bit decimal floating point multiplication (_Decimal32) df64mul 64 bit decimal floating point multiplication (_Decimal64) df128mul 128 bit decimal floating point multiplication (_Decimal128) df32div 32 bit decimal floating point division (_Decimal32) df64div 64 bit decimal floating point division (_Decimal64) df128div 128 bit decimal floating point division (_Decimal128) Note that some of these decimal floating point methods may not be available on some systems. --dfp-ops N stop after N decimal floating point bogo ops. Directories stressor --dir N start N workers that create, rename and remove directories using mkdir(2), rename(2) and rmdir(2). --dir-dirs N exercise dir on N directories. The default is 8192 directo- ries, this allows 64 to 65536 directories to be used in- stead. --dir-ops N stop directory thrash workers after N bogo directory opera- tions. Deep directories stressor --dirdeep N start N workers that create a depth-first tree of directo- ries to a maximum depth as limited by PATH_MAX or ENAMETOO- LONG (which ever occurs first). By default, each level of the tree contains one directory, but this can be increased to a maximum of 10 sub-trees using the --dirdeep-dir op- tion. To stress inode creation, a symlink and a hardlink to a file at the root of the tree is created in each level. --dirdeep-bytes N allocated file size, the default is 0. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. Used in conjunction with the --dirdeep-files option. --dirdeep-dirs N create N directories at each tree level. The default is just 1 but can be increased to a maximum of 36 per level. --dirdeep-files N create N files at each tree level. The default is 0 with the file size specified by the --dirdeep-bytes option. --dirdeep-inodes N consume up to N inodes per dirdeep stressor while creating directories and links. The value N can be the number of in- odes or a percentage of the total available free inodes on the filesystem being used. --dirdeep-ops N stop directory depth workers after N bogo directory opera- tions. Maximum files creation in a directory stressor --dirmany N start N stressors that create as many files in a directory as possible and then remove them. The file creation phase stops when an error occurs (for example, out of inodes, too many files, quota reached, etc.) and then the files are re- moved. This cycles until the run time is reached or the file creation count bogo-ops metric is reached. This is a much faster and light weight directory exercising stressor compared to the dentry stressor. --dirmany-bytes N allocated file size, the default is 0. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --dirmany-ops N stop dirmany stressors after N empty files have been cre- ated. Dnotify stressor --dnotify N start N workers performing file system activities such as making/deleting files/directories, renaming files, etc. to stress exercise the various dnotify events (Linux only). --dnotify-ops N stop dnotify stress workers after N dnotify bogo opera- tions. Dup stressor --dup N start N workers that perform dup(2) and then close(2) oper- ations on /dev/zero. The maximum opens at one time is sys- tem defined, so the test will run up to this maximum, or 65536 open file descriptors, which ever comes first. --dup-ops N stop the dup stress workers after N bogo open operations. Dynamic libraries loading stressor --dynlib N start N workers that dynamically load and unload various shared libraries. This exercises memory mapping and dynamic code loading and symbol lookups. See dlopen(3) for more de- tails of this mechanism. --dynlib-ops N stop workers after N bogo load/unload cycles. Easy CPU opcode stressor --easy-opcode N start N workers that exercise 64 continuous pages of radomly selected simple CPU opcodes. For example, for x86 processors this just exercises single byte opcodes such as nop and op-codes that set/clear CPU flags to put pressure on the front-end decoder and instruction cache. For RISC processors opcodes such as nop and simple register moves to/from the same registers are used. Smart emulators may remove some of these opcodes (e.g move r0,r0) and hence op- code rates may be artificially high. --easy-opcode-ops N stop after N executions of 64 continuous pages of opcodes. Eigen C++ matrix library stressor --eigen N start N workers that exercise the Eigen C++ matrix library for 2D matrix addition, multiplication, determinant, in- verse and transpose operations on long double, double and float matrices. This currently is only available for gcc/g++ builds. --eigen-method method select the floating point method to use, available methods are: Method Description all iterate over all the Eigen 2D ma- trix operations add-longdouble addition of two matrices of long double floating point values add-double addition of two matrices of double floating point values add-float addition of two matrices of float- ing point values determinant-longdouble determinant of matrix of long dou- ble floating point values determinant-double determinant of matrix of double floating point values determinant-float determinant of matrix of floating point values inverse-longdouble inverse of matrix of long double floating point values inverse-double inverse of matrix of double float- ing point values inverse-float inverse of matrix of floating point values multiply-longdouble multiplication of two matrices of long double floating point values multiply-doublee multiplication of two matrices of double floating point values multiply-float multiplication of two matrices of floating point values transpose-longdouble transpose of matrix of long double floating point values transpose-double transpose of matrix of double floating point values transpose-float transpose of matrix of floating point values --eigen-ops N stop after N Eigen matrix computations --eigen-size N specify the 2D matrix size N x N. The default is a 32 x 32 matrix. EFI variables stressor --efivar N start N workers that exercise the Linux /sys/firmware/efi/efivars and /sys/firmware/efi/vars inter- faces by reading the EFI variables. This is a Linux only stress test for platforms that support the EFI vars inter- face and may require the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability. --efivar-ops N stop the efivar stressors after N EFI variable read opera- tions. Non-functional system call (ENOSYS) stressor --enosys N start N workers that exercise non-functional system call numbers. This calls a wide range of system call numbers to see if it can break a system where these are not wired up correctly. It also keeps track of system calls that exist (ones that don't return ENOSYS) so that it can focus on purely finding and exercising non-functional system calls. This stressor exercises system calls from 0 to __NR_syscalls + 1024, random system calls within con- strained in the ranges of 0 to 2^8, 2^16, 2^24, 2^32, 2^40, 2^48, 2^56 and 2^64 bits, high system call numbers and var- ious other bit patterns to try to get wide coverage. To keep the environment clean, each system call being tested runs in a child process with reduced capabilities. --enosys-ops N stop after N bogo enosys system call attempts Environment variables stressor --env N start N workers that creates numerous large environment variables to try to trigger out of memory conditions using setenv(3). If ENOMEM occurs then the environment is emp- tied and another memory filling retry occurs. The process is restarted if it is killed by the Out Of Memory (OOM) killer. --env-ops N stop after N bogo setenv/unsetenv attempts. Epoll stressor --epoll N start N workers that perform various related socket stress activity using epoll_wait(2) to monitor and handle new con- nections. This involves client/server processes performing rapid connect, send/receives and disconnects on the local host. Using epoll allows a large number of connections to be efficiently handled, however, this can lead to the con- nection table filling up and blocking further socket con- nections, hence impacting on the epoll bogo op stats. For ipv4 and ipv6 domains, multiple servers are spawned on mul- tiple ports. The epoll stressor is for Linux only. --epoll-domain D specify the domain to use, the default is unix (aka local). Currently ipv4, ipv6 and unix are supported. --epoll-ops N stop epoll workers after N bogo operations. --epoll-port P start at socket port P. For N epoll worker processes, ports P to (P x 4) - 1 are used for ipv4, ipv6 domains and ports P to P - 1 are used for the unix domain. --epoll-sockets N specify the maximum number of concurrently open sockets al- lowed in server. Setting a high value impacts on memory usage and may trigger out of memory conditions. Event file descriptor (eventfd) stressor --eventfd N start N parent and child worker processes that read and write 8 byte event messages between them via the eventfd mechanism (Linux only). --eventfd-nonblock enable EFD_NONBLOCK to allow non-blocking on the event file descriptor. This will cause reads and writes to return with EAGAIN rather the blocking and hence causing a high rate of polling I/O. --eventfd-ops N stop eventfd workers after N bogo operations. Exec processes stressor --exec N start N workers continually forking children that exec stress-ng and then exit almost immediately. If a system has pthread support then 1 in 4 of the exec's will be from in- side a pthread to exercise exec'ing from inside a pthread context. --exec-fork-method [ clone | fork | rfork | spawn | vfork ] select the process creation method using clone(2), fork(2), BSD rfork(2), posix_spawn(3) or vfork(2). Note that vfork will only exec programs using execve due to the constraints on the shared stack between the parent and the child process. --exec-max P create P child processes that exec stress-ng and then wait for them to exit per iteration. The default is 4096; higher values may create many temporary zombie processes that are waiting to be reaped. One can potentially fill up the process table using high values for --exec-max and --exec. --exec-method [ all | execve | execveat | fexecve ] select the exec system call to use; all will perform a ran- dom choice between execve(2), execveat(2) and fexecve(3), execve will use execve(2), execveat will use execveat(2) (if available) and fexecve will use fexecve(3) (if avail- able). --exec-no-pthread do not use pthread_create(3). --exec-ops N stop exec stress workers after N bogo operations. Exiting pthread groups stressor --exit-group N start N workers that create 16 pthreads and terminate the pthreads and the controlling child process using exit_group(2). (Linux only stressor). --exit-group-ops N stop after N iterations of pthread creation and deletion loops. Exponential functions --expmath N start N workers that exercise various exponential functions with input values 0 to 1 in steps of 0.001; the results are sanity checked to ensure no variation occurs after each round of 10000 computations. --expmath-ops N stop after N exponential bogo-operation loops. --expmath-method method specify a exponential function to exercise. Available expo- nential stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below exponential functions methods cexp double complex natural exponential cexpf float complex natural exponential cexpl long double complex natural exponential exp double natural exponential expf float natural exponential expl long double natural exponential exp10 double base-10 exponential exp10f float base-10 exponential exp10l long double base-10 exponential exp2 double base-2 exponential exp2f float base-2 exponential exp2l long double base-2 exponential Factorization of large integers stressor --factor N start N workers that factorize large integers using the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library. Randomized values to be factorized are computed so that an N digit value is com- prised of about 0.4 x N random factors, for N > 100. The default number of digits in the value to be factorized is 10. --factor-digits N select the number of digits in the values to be factorized. Range 8 to 100000000 digits, default is 10. --factor-ops N stop after N factorizations. File space allocation (fallocate) stressor -F N, --fallocate N start N workers continually fallocating (preallocating file space) and ftruncating (file truncating) temporary files. If the file is larger than the free space, fallocate will produce an ENOSPC error which is ignored by this stressor. --fallocate-bytes N allocated file size, the default is 1 GB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --fallocate-ops N stop fallocate stress workers after N bogo fallocate opera- tions. Filesystem notification (fanotify) stressor --fanotify N start N workers performing file system activities such as creating, opening, writing, reading and unlinking files to exercise the fanotify event monitoring interface (Linux only). Each stressor runs a child process to generate file events and a parent process to read file events using fan- otify. Has to be run with CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability. --fanotify-ops N stop fanotify stress workers after N bogo fanotify events. CPU branching instruction cache stressor --far-branch N start N workers that exercise calls to tens of thousands of functions that are relatively far from the caller. All functions are 1 op instructions that return to the caller. The functions are placed in pages that are memory mapped with a wide spread of fixed virtual addresses. Function calls are pre-shuffled to create a randomized mix of ad- dresses to call. This stresses the instruction cache and any instruction TLBs. --far-branch-flush attempt to periodically flush instruction cache to produce instruction cache misses. --far-branch-ops N stop after N far branch bogo-ops. One full cycle of calling all the tens of thousands of functions equates to one bogo- op. --far-branch-pageout where possible pageout and soft-offline randomly selected pages that contain the far branch functions. This uses mad- vise(2) MADV_PAGEOUT and MADV_SOFT_OFFLINE to perform these actions. --far-branch-pages N specify the number of pages to allocate for far branch functions. The number for functions per page depends on the processor architecture, for example, x86 will have 4096 x 1 byte return instructions per 4 K page, where as SPARC64 will have only 512 x 8 byte return instructions per 4 K page. Page fault stressor --fault N start N workers that generates minor and major page faults. --fault-ops N stop the page fault workers after N bogo page fault opera- tions. Fcntl stressor --fcntl N start N workers that perform fcntl(2) calls with various commands. The exercised commands (if available) are: F_CREATED_QUERY, F_DUPFD, F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC, F_GETFD, F_SETFD, F_GETFL, F_SETFL, F_GETOWN, F_SETOWN, F_GETOWN_EX, F_SETOWN_EX, F_GETSIG, F_SETSIG, F_GETOWNER_UIDS, F_GETLEASE, F_GETLK, F_SETLK, F_SETLKW, F_UNLCK, F_OFD_GETLK, F_OFD_SETLK, F_OFD_SETLKW, F_GET_FILE_RW_HINT, F_SET_FILE_RW_HINT, F_GET_RW_HINT and F_SET_RW_HINT. --fcntl-ops N stop the fcntl workers after N bogo fcntl operations. File descriptor abusing stressor --fd-abuse N start N workers that open file descriptors using various ways (file, dup, socket, pipe, timerfd, pidfd, userfaultfd, etc.) and perform valid and invalid file operations on these descriptors. This exercises a mix of successful and failed file operations on a wide range of file descriptor types. --fd-abuse-ops N stop after N file abuse file operation bogo-ops. File descriptor duplication and closing stressor --fd-fork N start N workers that open files using dup(2) on a file (/dev/zero by default) and then copies these using multiple fork'd child processes and closes them with the fast clone_range(2) or close(2) or by directly ending the processes using _exit(2). For every bogo-op, the stressor attempts to dup(2) another 10000 file descriptors up to the maximum allowed, fork 8 child processes that then close their copies of the file descriptors. --fd-fork-fds N specify maximum number of file descriptors to be opened. The default is 2 million, with a range of 1000 to 16 mil- lion. The actual number used may be less depending on the system defined limits of the number of open files per process. --fd-fork-file [ null | random | stdin | stdout | zero ] specify file to dup: null for /dev/null, random for /dev/random, stdin for standard input, stdout for standard output, zero for /dev/zero. Default is /dev/zero. --fd-fork-ops N stop after N rounds of 10000 dups, forking/closing/exiting and waiting for the child processes. Note that the bogo-ops metric rate will slow down over time as this stressor in- creases the number of open files per bogo-loop and this in- creases the fork and close run times. File descriptor race stressor --fd-race N start N workers that attempt to force race conditions on opened file descriptors. Opened file descriptors are passed from a server to a client over a socket. At periodic intervals batches of the file descriptors are duplicated by creating multiple pthreads and then closed en-masse with synchronized pthread termination. Also other concurrent pthreads exercise various file based system calls on file descriptors that are in the process of being created. By default a single file is used for the open calls, however /dev and /proc files can be exercised using the appropriate fd-race options. --fd-race-dev exercise /dev files for race conditions. --fd-race-race-ops N stop after N file descriptors have been exercised. --fd-race-proc exercise /proc files for race conditions. Fibonacci search stressor --fibsearch N start N workers that use a search a sorted array of 32 bit integers using a Fibonacci search. A Fibonacci seaarch is similar to a bsearch except that it uses the Fibonacci se- ries to divide the search into unequal sized spaces. It avoids the costly division operator found in bsearches and examines closer elements on each search step so there is a slight compute and cache advantage over bsearch. By de- fault, there are 65536 elements in the array. This is a useful method to exercise random access of memory and processor cache. --fibsearch-ops N stop the fibsearch worker after N bogo fibsearch operations are completed. --fibsearch-size N specify the size (number of 32 bit integers) in the array to fibsearch. Size can be from 1 K to 4 M. File extent (fiemap) stressor --fiemap N start N workers that each create a file with many randomly changing extents and has 4 child processes per worker that gather the extent information using the FS_IOC_FIEMAP ioctl(2). --fiemap-bytes N specify the size of the fiemap'd file in bytes. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suf- fix b, k, m or g. Larger files will contain more extents, causing more stress when gathering extent information. --fiemap-ops N stop after N fiemap bogo operations. FIFO named pipe stressor --fifo N start N workers that exercise a named pipe by transmitting 64 bit integers. --fifo-data-size N set the byte size of the fifo write/reads, default is 8, range 8..4096. --fifo-ops N stop fifo workers after N bogo pipe write operations. --fifo-readers N for each worker, create N fifo reader workers that read the named pipe using simple blocking reads. Default is 4, range 1..64. File I/O control (ioctl) stressor --file-ioctl N start N workers that exercise various file specific ioctl(2) calls. This will attempt to use the FIONBIO, FIOQ- SIZE, FIGETBSZ, FIOCLEX, FIONCLEX, FIONBIO, FIOASYNC, FIOQ- SIZE, FIFREEZE, FITHAW, FICLONE, FICLONERANGE, FIONREAD, FIONWRITE and FS_IOC_RESVSP ioctls if these are defined. --file-ioctl-ops N stop file-ioctl workers after N file ioctl bogo operations. Filename stressor --filename N start N workers that exercise file creation using various length filenames containing a range of allowed filename characters. This will try to see if it can exceed the file system allowed filename length was well as test various filename lengths between 1 and the maximum allowed by the file system. --filename-ops N stop filename workers after N bogo filename tests. --filename-opts opt use characters in the filename based on option `opt'. Valid options are: Option Description probe default option, probe the file system for valid allowed characters in a file name and use these posix use characters as specified by The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, POSIX.1-2008, 3.278 Portable Filename Character Set ext use characters allowed by the ext2, ext3, ext4 file systems, namely any 8 bit character apart from NUL and / utf8 use struct utf8 characters in filename urf8-like use utf8 like characters with illegal utf8 en- codings when generating random filenames File race stressor --filerace N start N workers that each run 8 concurrent processes that exercise a randomized set of file related system calls on 64 random files. This attempts to trip any file system race conditions while files are being operated upon. The random- ized operations will cause some invalid file operations to fail, these failures are silently ignored. --filerace-ops N stop after N randomized file bogo-operations, this is not a reliable metric of performance because of the highly ran- domized actions occurring on randomly selected files. Single cacheline coherency scalability stressor --flipflop N start N workers where each worker creates two groups of threads of the same size where each group is affined to a set of CPUs. A continuous bitmap that has enough bits for each thread pair is exercised, each thread pair tries to flip/flop their specific bit using cmpxchg (compare/ex- change); one thread tries to flip the bit from 0 to 1 and the other tries to flop the bit from 1 to 0. This stressor makes threads compete on the same cacheline and measures the total number of flip/flop operations and the distribu- tion of successful flip/flops among the threads (to see if thread pairs get starved in favour of others). --flipflop-bits N specifies number of bits in the bitmap (and hence number of flip/flop thread pairs). --flipflop-taskset1 list list of CPUs to affine the flip threads to. Refer to the --taskset option description for the syntax of the list ar- gument. --flipflop-taskset2 list list of CPUs to affine the flop threads to. Refer to the --taskset option description for the syntax of the list ar- gument. --flipflop-ops N stop after N bogo-ops, in this case a bogo-op is 100000 flip-flop operations. BSD File locking (flock) stressor --flock N start N workers locking on a single file. --flock-ops N stop flock stress workers after N bogo flock operations. Cache flushing stressor --flush-cache N start N workers that flush the data and instruction cache (where possible). Some architectures may not support cache flushing on either cache, in which case these become no- ops. --flush-cache-ops N stop after N cache flush iterations. Fused Multiply/Add floating point operations (fma) stressor --fma N start N workers that exercise single and double precision floating point multiplication and add operations on arrays of 512 floating point values. More modern processors (In- tel Haswell, AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver) and modern C compilers these will be performed by fused-multiply-add (fma3) opcodes. Operations used are: a = (a x b) + c a = (b x a) + c a = (b x c) + a a = (a x b) - c a = (b x a) - c a = (b x c) - a --fma-libc use libc fma math functions if they are available. These use either the libc FMA macros if defined, the __builtin libc functions or the fma libc functions. Generally these are slower than directly multiply/add fused code generated by the compiler. --fma-ops N stop after N bogo-loops of the 3 above operations on 512 single and double precision floating point numbers. Process forking stressor -f N, --fork N start N workers continually forking children that immedi- ately exit. --fork-max P create P child processes and then wait for them to exit per iteration. The default is just 1; higher values will create many temporary zombie processes that are waiting to be reaped. One can potentially fill up the process table using high values for --fork-max and --fork. --fork-ops N stop fork stress workers after N bogo operations. --fork-pageout enable force paging-out of memory resident pages in fork stressor instances. --fork-unmap attempt to unmap unused non-memory resident shared library pages to try and reduced anonymous vma copying. This is an ugly hack for benchmarking reduced vma copying and not guaranteed to work. Linux only. --fork-vm enable detrimental performance virtual memory advice using madvise(2) on all pages of the forked process. Where possi- ble this will try to set every page in the new process with using madvise(2) MADV_MERGEABLE, MADV_WILLNEED, MADV_HUGEPAGE and MADV_RANDOM flags. Linux only. Heavy process forking stressor --forkheavy N start N workers that fork child processes from a parent that has thousands of allocated system resources. The fork becomes a heavyweight operations as it has to duplicate the resource references of the parent. Each stressor instance creates and reaps up to 4096 child processes that are cre- ated and reaped in a first-in first-out manner. --forkheavy-allocs N attempt N resource allocation loops per stressor instance. Resources include pipes, file descriptors, memory mappings, pthreads, timers, ptys, semaphores, message queues and tem- porary files. These create heavyweight processes that are more time expensive to fork from. Default is 16384. --forkheavy-mlock attempt to mlock(2) future allocated pages into memory causing more memory pressure. If mlock(MCL_FUTURE) is im- plemented then this will stop new brk pages from being swapped out. --forkheavy-ops N stop after N fork calls. --forkheavy-procs N attempt to fork N processes per stressor. The default is 4096 processes. Floating point operations stressor --fp N start N workers that exercise addition, multiplication and division operations on a range of floating point types. For each type, 8 floating point values are operated upon 65536 times in a loop per bogo op. --fp-method method select the floating point method to use, available methods are: Method Description all iterate over all the following floating point methods: float128add 128 bit floating point addition ibm128add IBM 128 bit floating point addition (powerpc) float80add 80 bit floating point addition float64add 64 bit floating point addition float32add 32 bit binary32 floating point addition floatadd floating point addition bf16add bf16 floating point addition doubleadd double precision floating point addition ldoubleadd long double precision floating point addition float128sub 128 bit floating point subtraction ibm128sub IBM 128 bit floating point subtraction (powerpc) float80sub 80 bit floating point subtraction float64sub 64 bit floating point subtraction float32sub 32 bit binary32 floating point subtraction floatsub floating point subtraction bf16sub bf16 floating point subtraction doublesub double precision floating point subtraction ldoublesub long double precision floating point subtraction float128mul 128 bit floating point multiplication ibm128mul IBM 128 bit floating point multiplication (powerpc) float80mul 80 bit floating point multiplication float64mul 64 bit floating point multiplication float32mul 32 bit binary32 floating point multiplication floatmul floating point multiplication bf16mul bf16 floating point multiplication doublemul double precision floating point multiplication ldoublemul long double precision floating point multiplication float128div 128 bit floating point division ibm128div IBM 128 bit floating point division (powerpc) float80div 80 bit floating point division float64div 64 bit floating point division float32div 32 bit binary32 floating point division floatdiv floating point division bf16div bf16 floating point division doublediv double precision floating point division ldoublediv long double precision floating point division Note that some of these floating point methods may not be available on some systems. --fp-ops N stop after N floating point bogo ops. Note that bogo-ops are counted for just standard float, double and long double floating point types. Floating point exception stressor --fp-error N start N workers that generate floating point exceptions. Computations are performed to force and check for the FE_DIVBYZERO, FE_INEXACT, FE_INVALID, FE_OVERFLOW and FE_UNDERFLOW exceptions. EDOM and ERANGE errors are also checked. --fp-error-ops N stop after N bogo floating point exceptions. File punch and hole filling stressor --fpunch N start N workers that punch and fill holes in a 16 MB file using five concurrent processes per stressor exercising on the same file. Where available, this uses fallocate(2) FAL- LOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE, FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE, FAL- LOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE, FALLOC_FL_COLLAPSE_RANGE and FAL- LOC_FL_INSERT_RANGE to make and fill holes across the file and breaks it into multiple extents. --fpunch-bytes N set maximum size of each file for each fpunch worker process, the default is 16 MB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --fpunch-ops N stop fpunch workers after N punch and fill bogo operations. Fractal Stressor --fractal N start N workers that generate 2D fractals. By default a 1024 x 1024 point Mandelbrot set is computed with a maximum of 256 iterations per point in the iterative compute loop. The fractal is computed row by row with multiple rows shared amongst the N fractal stressor instances. Double precision floating point values are used for the points in the complex set of values. Naive computation is used with no special algorithmic short-cuts or interpolation. --fractal-iterations N specify the maximum number of iterations for the quadratic map computation of each point, default is 256 iterations. --fractal-method [ julia | mandelbrot ] select the method of fractal generation, Julia set or Man- delbrot set, default is the Mandelbrot set. --fractal-ops N stop after N fractals have been generated. --fractal-sizex N set the maximum width of the fractal, default is 1024 points. --fractal-sizey N set the maximum height of the fractal, default is 1024 points. File size limit stressor --fsize N start N workers that exercise file size limits (via setr- limit(2) RLIMIT_FSIZE) with file sizes that are fixed, ran- dom and powers of 2. The files are truncated and allocated to trigger SIGXFSZ signals. --fsize-ops N stop after N bogo file size test iterations. File stats (fstat) stressor --fstat N start N workers fstat'ing files in a directory (default is /dev). --fstat-dir directory specify the directory to fstat to override the default of /dev. All the files in the directory will be fstat'd re- peatedly. --fstat-ops N stop fstat stress workers after N bogo fstat operations. /dev/full stressor --full N start N workers that exercise /dev/full. This attempts to write to the device (which should always get error ENOSPC), to read from the device (which should always return a buffer of zeros) and to seek randomly on the device (which should always succeed). (Linux only). --full-ops N stop the stress full workers after N bogo I/O operations. Function argument passing stressor --funccall N start N workers that call functions of 1 through to 9 argu- ments. By default all functions with a range of argument types are called, however, this can be changed using the --funccall-method option. This exercises stack function ar- gument passing and re-ordering on the stack and in regis- ters. --funccall-ops N stop the funccall workers after N bogo function call opera- tions. Each bogo operation is 1000 calls of functions of 1 through to 9 arguments of the chosen argument type. --funccall-method method specify the method of funccall argument type to be used. The default is all the types but can be one of bool, uint8, uint16, uint32, uint64, uint128, float, double, longdouble, cfloat (complex float), cdouble (complex double), clongdou- ble (complex long double), float16, float32, float64, float80, float128, decimal32, decimal64 and decimal128. Note that some of these types are only available with spe- cific architectures and compiler versions. Function return stressor --funcret N start N workers that pass and return by value various small to large data types. --funcret-ops N stop the funcret workers after N bogo function call opera- tions. --funcret-method method specify the method of funcret argument type to be used. The default is uint64_t but can be one of uint8 uint16 uint32 uint64 uint128 float double longdouble float80 float128 decimal32 decimal64 decimal128 uint8x32 uint8x128 uint64x128. Fast mutex (futex) stressor --futex N start N workers that rapidly exercise the futex system call. Each worker has two processes, a futex waiter and a futex waker. The waiter waits with a very small timeout to stress the timeout and rapid polled futex waiting. This is a Linux specific stress option. --futex-ops N stop futex workers after N bogo successful futex wait oper- ations. Fetching data from kernel stressor --get N start N workers that call system calls that fetch data from the kernel, currently these are: getpid(2), getppid(2), getcwd(3), getgid(2), getegid(2), getuid(2), getgroups(2), getpgrp(2), getpgid(2), getpriority(2), getresgid(2), ge- tresuid(2), getrlimit(2), prlimit(2), getrusage(2), get- sid(2), gettid(2), getcpu(2), gettimeofday(2), uname(2), adjtimex(2), sysfs(2). Some of these system calls are OS specific. --get-ops N stop get workers after N bogo get operations. --get-slow-sync attempt to synchronize system calls across the N get work- ers to try to force forms of locking contention in the ker- nel on the more complex cases. Each system call is exer- cised concurrently with the N workers for 0.1 seconds at a time, so it takes a 3-4 seconds to work through all the system calls. Get directory entries stressor (Linux) --getdent N start N workers that recursively read directories /proc, /dev/, /tmp, /sys and /run using getdents(2) and get- dents64(2) (Linux only). --getdent-ops N stop getdent workers after N bogo getdent bogo operations. Random data (getrandom) stressor --getrandom N start N workers that get 8192 random bytes from the /dev/urandom pool using the getrandom(2) system call (Linux) or getentropy(2) (OpenBSD). --getrandom-ops N stop getrandom workers after N bogo get operations. CPU pipeline and branch prediction stressor --goto N start N workers that perform 1024 forward branches (to next instruction) or backward branches (to previous instruction) for each bogo operation loop. By default, every 1024 branches the direction is randomly chosen to be forward or backward. This stressor exercises suboptimal pipelined ex- ecution and branch prediction logic. --goto-direction [ forward | backward | random ] select the branching direction in the stressor loop, for- ward for forward only branching, backward for a backward only branching, random for a random choice of forward or random branching every 1024 branches. --goto-ops N stop goto workers after N bogo loops of 1024 branch in- structions. 2D GPU stressor --gpu N start N worker that exercise the GPU. This specifies a 2-D texture image that allows the elements of an image array to be read by shaders, and render primitives using an opengl context. --gpu-devnode DEVNAME specify the device node name of the GPU device, the default is /dev/dri/renderD128. --gpu-frag N specify shader core usage per pixel, this sets N loops in the fragment shader. --gpu-ops N stop gpu workers after N render loop operations. --gpu-tex-size N specify upload texture N x N, by default this value is 4096 x 4096. --gpu-xsize X use a framebuffer size of X pixels. The default is 256 pix- els. --gpu-ysize Y use a framebuffer size of Y pixels. The default is 256 pix- els. --gpu-upload N specify upload texture N times per frame, the default value is 1. Handle stressor --handle N start N workers that exercise the name_to_handle_at(2) and open_by_handle_at(2) system calls. (Linux only). --handle-ops N stop after N handle bogo operations. String hashing stressor --hash N start N workers that exercise various hashing functions. Random strings from 1 to 128 bytes are hashed and the hash- ing rate and chi squared is calculated from the number of hashes performed over a period of time. The chi squared value is the goodness-of-fit measure, it is the actual dis- tribution of items in hash buckets versus the expected dis- tribution of items. Typically a chi squared value close to 1.0 indicates a good hash distribution. --hash-method method specify the hashing method to use, by default all the hash- ing methods are cycled through. Methods available are: Method Description all cycle through all the hashing methods adler32 Mark Adler checksum, a modification of the Fletcher checksum coffin xor and 5 bit rotate left hash coffin32 xor and 5 bit rotate left hash with 32 bit fetch optimization crc32c compute CRC32C (Castagnoli CRC32) integer hash djb2a Dan Bernstein hash using the xor variant fnv1a FNV-1a Fowler-Noll-Vo hash using the xor then multiply variant jenkin Jenkin's integer hash kandr Kernighan and Richie's multiply by 31 and add hash from "The C Programming Language", 2nd Edition knuth Donald E. Knuth's hash from "The Art Of Com- puter Programming", Volume 3, chapter 6.4 loselose Kernighan and Richie's simple hash from "The C Programming Language", 1st Edition mid5 xor shift hash of the middle 5 characters of the string. Designed by Colin Ian King muladd32 simple multiply and add hash using 32 bit math and xor folding of overflow muladd64 simple multiply and add hash using 64 bit math and xor folding of overflow mulxror32 32 bit multiply, xor and rotate right. Mangles 32 bits where possible. Designed by Colin Ian King mulxror64 64 bit multiply, xor and rotate right. 64 Bit version of mulxror32 murmur3_32 Austin Appleby's Murmur3 hash, 32 bit variant nhash exim's nhash. pjw a non-cryptographic hash function created by Peter J. Weinberger of AT&T Bell Labs, used in UNIX ELF object files sdbm sdbm hash as used in the SDBM database and GNU awk sedgwick simple hash from Robert Sedgwick's C program- ming book sobel Justin Sobel's bitwise shift hash x17 multiply by 17 and add. The multiplication can be optimized down to a fast right shift by 4 and add on some architectures xor simple rotate shift and xor of values xorror32 32 bit exclusive-or with right rotate hash, a fast string hash, designed by Colin Ian King xorror64 64 bit version of xorror32 xxhash the "Extremely fast" hash in non-streaming mode --hash-ops N stop after N hashing rounds File-system stressor -d N, --hdd N start N workers continually writing, reading and removing temporary files. The default mode is to stress test sequen- tial writes and reads. With the --aggressive option en- abled without any --hdd-opts options the hdd stressor will work through all the --hdd-opt options one by one to cover a range of I/O options. --hdd-bytes N write N bytes for each hdd process, the default is 1 GB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes us- ing the suffix b, k, m or g. --hdd-opts list specify various stress test options as a comma separated list. Options are as follows: Option Description direct try to minimize cache effects of the I/O. File I/O writes are performed directly from user space buffers and synchronous transfer is also attempted. To guarantee synchro- nous I/O, also use the sync option. dsync ensure output has been transferred to un- derlying hardware and file metadata has been updated (using the O_DSYNC open flag). This is equivalent to each write(2) being followed by a call to fdatasync(2). See also the fdatasync option. fadv-dontneed advise kernel to expect the data will not be accessed in the near future. fadv-noreuse advise kernel to expect the data to be ac- cessed only once. fadv-normal advise kernel there are no explicit access pattern for the data. This is the default advice assumption. fadv-rnd advise kernel to expect random access pat- terns for the data. fadv-seq advise kernel to expect sequential access patterns for the data. fadv-willneed advise kernel to expect the data to be ac- cessed in the near future. fsync flush all modified in-core data after each write to the output device using an ex- plicit fsync(2) call. fdatasync similar to fsync, but do not flush the mod- ified metadata unless metadata is required for later data reads to be handled cor- rectly. This uses an explicit fdatasync(2) call. iovec use readv/writev multiple buffer I/Os rather than read/write. Instead of 1 read/write operation, the buffer is broken into an iovec of 16 buffers. noatime do not update the file last access time- stamp, this can reduce metadata writes. sync ensure output has been transferred to un- derlying hardware (using the O_SYNC open flag). This is equivalent to a each write(2) being followed by a call to fsync(2). See also the fsync option. rd-rnd read data randomly. rd-seq read data sequentially. syncfs write all buffered modifications of file metadata and data on the filesystem that contains the hdd worker files. utimes force update of file timestamp which may increase metadata writes. wr-rnd write data randomly. The wr-seq option can- not be used at the same time. wr-seq write data sequentially. This is the de- fault if no write modes are specified. Note that some of these options are mutually exclusive, for exam- ple, there can be only one method of writing or reading. Also, fadvise flags may be mutually exclusive, for example fadv-willneed cannot be used with fadv-dontneed. --hdd-ops N stop hdd stress workers after N bogo operations. --hdd-write-size N specify size of each write in bytes. Size can be from 1 byte to 4 MB. BSD heapsort stressor --heapsort N start N workers that sort 32 bit integers using the BSD heapsort. --heapsort-method [ heapsort-libc | heapsort-nonlibc ] select either the libc implementation of heapsort or an op- timized implementation of heapsort. The default is the libc implementation if it is available. --heapsort-ops N stop heapsort stress workers after N bogo heapsorts. --heapsort-size N specify number of 32 bit integers to sort, default is 262144 (256 x 1024). High resolution timer stressor --hrtimers N start N workers that exercise high resolution times at a high frequency. Each stressor starts 32 processes that run with random timer intervals of 0..499999 nanoseconds. Run- ning this stressor with appropriate privilege will run these with the SCHED_RR policy. --hrtimers-adjust enable automatic timer rate adjustment to try to maximize the hrtimer frequency. The signal rate is measured every 0.1 seconds and the hrtimer delay is adjusted to try and set the optimal hrtimer delay to generate the highest hrtimer rates. --hrtimers-ops N stop hrtimers stressors after N timer event bogo operations Hashtable searching (hsearch) stressor --hsearch N start N workers that search a 80% full hash table using hsearch(3). By default, there are 8192 elements inserted into the hash table. This is a useful method to exercise access of memory and processor cache. --hsearch-method [ hsearch-libc | hsearch-nonlibc ] select either the libc implementation of hsearch or a slightly optimized non-libc implementation of hsearch. The default is the libc implementation if it exists, otherwise the non-libc version. --hsearch-ops N stop the hsearch workers after N bogo hsearch operations are completed. --hsearch-size N specify the number of hash entries to be inserted into the hash table. Size can be from 1 K to 4 M. Hyperbolic functions stressor --hyperbolic N start N workers that exercise sinh, cosh, and tanh libm hy- perbolic functions using float, double and long double floating point variants. Each function is exercised 10000 times per bogo-operation. --hyperbolic-method function specify a hyperbolic stress function. By default, all the functions are exercised sequentially, however one can spec- ify just one function to be used if required. Available options are as follows: Method Description all iterate through all of the following hyperbolic functions cosh hyperbolic cosine (double precision) coshf hyperbolic cosine (float precision) coshl hyperbolic cosine (long double precision) sinh hyperbolic sine (double precision) sinhf hyperbolic sine (float precision) sinhl hyperbolic sine (long double precision) tanh hyperbolic tangent (double precision) tanhf hyperbolic tangent (float precision) tanhl hyperbolic tangent (long double precision) --hyperbolic-ops N stop after N bogo-operations. CPU instruction cache load stressor --icache N start N workers that stress the instruction cache by forc- ing instruction cache reloads. --icache-ops N stop the icache workers after N bogo icache operations are completed. ICMP flooding stressor --icmp-flood N start N workers that flood localhost with randomly sized ICMP ping packets. This stressor requires the CAP_NET_RAW capbility. --icmp-flood-max-size use a maximum packet size of 65535 bytes instead of the de- fault of 1000 bytes. --icmp-flood-ops N stop icmp flood workers after N ICMP ping packets have been sent. Idle page scan stressor (Linux) --idle-page N start N workers that walks through every page exercising the Linux /sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap interface. Re- quires CAP_SYS_RESOURCE capability. --idle-page-ops N stop after N bogo idle page operations. Inode ioctl flags stressor --inode-flags N start N workers that exercise inode flags using the FS_IOC_GETFLAGS and FS_IOC_SETFLAGS ioctl(2) and inode at- tributes using file_getattr(2) and file_getatt(2). This attempts to apply all the available inode flags onto a di- rectory and file even if the underlying file system may not support these flags (errors are just ignored). Each worker runs 4 threads that exercise the flags on the same direc- tory and file to try to force races. This is a Linux only stressor, see ioctl_iflags(2) for more details. --inode-flags-ops N stop the inode-flags workers after N ioctl flag setting at- tempts. Inotify stressor --inotify N start N workers performing file system activities such as making/deleting files/directories, moving files, etc. to stress exercise the various inotify events (Linux only). --inotify-ops N stop inotify stress workers after N inotify bogo opera- tions. Insertion sort stressor --insertionsort N start N workers that sort 32 bit integers using insertion sort. --insertionsort-ops N stop insertionsort stress workers after N bogo insertion sorts. --insertionsort-size N specify number of 32 bit integers to sort, default is 16384 (16 x 1024). Integer Math Operations --intmath N start N workers that perform addition, subtraction, multi- plication, division and modulo math operations on 128, 64, 32, 16 and 8 bit signed integers. --intmath-fast when available use int_fast64_t, int_fast32_t, int_fast16_t and int_fast8_t types instead of int64_t, int32_t, int16_t and int8_t types. Note that these may or may not be faster than normal integer operations depending on the compiler. --intmath-method method select the integer math method to use, available methods are: Method Description all iterate over all the following integer methods: add128 128 bit signed integer addition add64 64 bit signed integer addition add32 32 bit signed integer addition add16 16 bit signed integer addition add8 8 bit signed integer addition sub128 128 bit signed integer subtraction sub64 64 bit signed integer subtraction sub32 32 bit signed integer subtraction sub16 16 bit signed integer subtraction sub8 8 bit signed integer subtraction mul128 128 bit signed integer multiplication mul64 64 bit signed integer multiplication mul32 32 bit signed integer multiplication mul16 16 bit signed integer multiplication mul8 8 bit signed integer multiplication div128 128 bit signed integer division div64 64 bit signed integer division div32 32 bit signed integer division div16 16 bit signed integer division div8 8 bit signed integer division mod128 128 bit signed integer modulo mod64 64 bit signed integer modulo mod32 32 bit signed integer modulo mod16 16 bit signed integer modulo mod8 8 bit signed integer modulo for the --intmath-fast option, the following methods are available: Method Description all iterate over all the following integer methods: addfast64 fast 64 bit signed integer addition addfast32 fast 32 bit signed integer addition addfast16 fast 16 bit signed integer addition addfast8 fast 8 bit signed integer addition subfast64 fast 64 bit signed integer subtraction subfast32 fast 32 bit signed integer subtraction subfast16 fast 16 bit signed integer subtraction subfast8 fast 8 bit signed integer subtraction mulfast64 fast 64 bit signed integer multiplication mulfast32 fast 32 bit signed integer multiplication mulfast16 fast 16 bit signed integer multiplication mulfast8 fast 8 bit signed integer multiplication divfast64 fast 64 bit signed integer division divfast32 fast 32 bit signed integer division divfast16 fast 16 bit signed integer division divfast8 fast 8 bit signed integer division modfast64 fast 64 bit signed integer modulo modfast32 fast 32 bit signed integer modulo modfast16 fast 16 bit signed integer modulo modfast8 fast 8 bit signed integer modulo --intmath-ops N stop intmath workers after N bogo integer math operations. Data synchronization (sync) stressor -i N, --io N start N workers continuously calling sync(2) to commit buffer cache to disk. This can be used in conjunction with the --hdd stressor. This is a legacy stressor that is com- patible with the original stress tool. --io-ops N stop io stress workers after N bogo operations. IO mixing stressor --iomix N start N workers that perform a mix of sequential, random and memory mapped read/write operations as well as random copy file read/writes, forced sync'ing and (if run as root) cache dropping. Multiple child processes are spawned to all share a single file and perform different I/O opera- tions on the same file. --iomix-bytes N write N bytes for each iomix worker process, the default is 1 GB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --iomix-ops N stop iomix stress workers after N bogo iomix I/O opera- tions. Ioport stressor (x86 Linux) --ioport N start N workers than perform bursts of 16 reads and 16 writes of ioport 0x80 (x86 Linux systems only). I/O per- formed on x86 platforms on port 0x80 will cause delays on the CPU performing the I/O. --ioport-ops N stop the ioport stressors after N bogo I/O operations --ioport-opts [ in | out | inout ] specify the io operation to be performed. The default is both in and out. specify if port reads in, port read writes out or reads and writes are --ioport-port [ post | vga-dac-r | bochs-debug ] select x86 I/O port to use, post (Power-On-Self-Test port 0x80), vga-dac-r (VGA DAC Red port 0x3c8) or bochs-debug (Bochs debug port 0xe9) IO scheduling class and priority stressor --ioprio N start N workers that exercise the ioprio_get(2) and io- prio_set(2) system calls (Linux only). --ioprio-ops N stop after N io priority bogo operations. Io-uring stressor --io-uring N start N workers that perform various io-uring file opera- tions using the Linux io-uring interface. --io-uring-entries N specify the number of io-uring ring entries. --io-uring-ops stop after N rounds of io-uring operations. --io-uring-rand randomize order of io-uring operations and file seek loca- tions. Ipsec multi-buffer cryptographic stressor --ipsec-mb N start N workers that perform cryptographic processing using the highly optimized Intel Multi-Buffer Crypto for IPsec library. Depending on the features available, SSE, AVX, AVX and AVX512 CPU features will be used on data encrypted by SHA, DES, CMAC, CTR, HMAC MD5, HMAC SHA1 and HMAC SHA512 cryptographic routines. This is only available for x86-64 modern Intel CPUs. --ipsec-mb-feature [ sse | avx | avx2 | avx512 | noaesni ] Just use the specified processor CPU feature. By default, all the available features for the CPU are exercised. --ipsec-mb-jobs N Process N multi-block rounds of cryptographic processing per iteration. The default is 256. --ipsec-mb-method [ all | cmac | ctr | des | hmac-md5 | hmac-sha1 | hmac-sha512 | sha ] Select the ipsec-mb crypto/integrity method. --ipsec-mb-ops N stop after N rounds of processing of data using the crypto- graphic routines. System interval timer stressor --itimer N start N workers that exercise the system interval timers. This sets up an ITIMER_PROF itimer that generates a SIGPROF signal. The default frequency for the itimer is 1 MHz, however, the Linux kernel will set this to be no more that the jiffy setting, hence high frequency SIGPROF signals are not normally possible. A busy loop spins on getitimer(2) calls to consume CPU and hence decrement the itimer based on amount of time spent in CPU and system time. --itimer-freq F run itimer at F Hz; range from 1 to 1000000 Hz. Normally the highest frequency is limited by the number of jiffy ticks per second, so running above 1000 Hz is difficult to attain in practice. --itimer-ops N stop itimer stress workers after N bogo itimer SIGPROF sig- nals. --itimer-rand select an interval timer frequency based around the inter- val timer frequency +-12.5% random jitter. This tries to force more variability in the timer interval to make the scheduling less predictable. Jpeg compression stressor --jpeg N start N workers that use jpeg compression on a machine gen- erated plasma field image. The default image is a plasma field, however different image types may be selected. The starting raster line is changed on each compression itera- tion to cycle around the data. --jpeg-height H use a RGB sample image height of H pixels. The default is 512 pixels. --jpeg-image [ brown | flat | gradient | noise | plasma | xstripes ] select the source image type to be compressed. Available image types are: Type Description brown brown noise, red and green values vary by a 3 bit value, blue values vary by a 2 bit value. flat a single random colour for the entire image. gradient linear gradient of the red, green and blue compo- nents across the width and height of the image. noise random white noise for red, green, blue values. plasma plasma field with smooth colour transitions and hard boundary edges. xstripes a random colour for each horizontal line. --jpeg-ops N stop after N jpeg compression operations. --jpeg-quality Q use the compression quality Q. The range is 1..100 (1 low- est, 100 highest), with a default of 95 --jpeg-width H use a RGB sample image width of H pixels. The default is 512 pixels. Judy array stressor --judy N start N workers that insert, search and delete 32 bit inte- gers in a Judy array using a predictable yet sparse array index. By default, there are 131072 integers used in the Judy array. This is a useful method to exercise random ac- cess of memory and processor cache. --judy-ops N stop the judy workers after N bogo judy operations are com- pleted. --judy-size N specify the size (number of 32 bit integers) in the Judy array to exercise. Size can be from 1 K to 4 M 32 bit in- tegers. Kcmp stressor (Linux) --kcmp N start N workers that use kcmp(2) to compare parent and child processes to determine if they share kernel re- sources. Supported only for Linux and requires CAP_SYS_PTRACE capability. --kcmp-ops N stop kcmp workers after N bogo kcmp operations. Kernel key management stressor --key N start N workers that create and manipulate keys using add_key(2) and ketctl(2). As many keys are created as the per user limit allows and then the following keyctl com- mands are exercised on each key: KEYCTL_SET_TIMEOUT, KEYCTL_DESCRIBE, KEYCTL_UPDATE, KEYCTL_READ, KEYCTL_CLEAR and KEYCTL_INVALIDATE. --key-ops N stop key workers after N bogo key operations. Process signals stressor --kill N start N workers sending SIGUSR1 kill(2) signals to a SIG_IGN signal handler in the stressor and SIGUSR1 kill signal to a child stressor with a SIGUSR1 handler. Most of the process time will end up in kernel space. --kill-ops N stop kill workers after N bogo kill operations. Syslog stressor (Linux) --klog N start N workers exercising the kernel syslog(2) system call. This will attempt to read the kernel log with vari- ous sized read buffers. Linux only. --klog-ops N stop klog workers after N syslog operations. KVM stressor --kvm N start N workers that create, run and destroy a minimal vir- tual machine, 64 bit ARM, RISC-V and x86 ARM Linux only. For x86 the virtual machine reads, increments and writes to port 0x80 in a spin loop and the stressor handles the I/O transactions. For ARM64 and RISC-V the virtual machine writes to a MMIO region and the stressor handles the MMIO exits. --kvm-ops N stop kvm stressors after N virtual machines have been cre- ated, run and destroyed. CPU L1 cache stressor --l1cache N start N workers that exercise the CPU level 1 cache with reads and writes. A cache aligned buffer that is twice the level 1 cache size is read and then written in level 1 cache set sized steps over each level 1 cache set. This is designed to exercise cache block evictions. The bogo-op count measures the number of million cache lines touched. Where possible, the level 1 cache geometry is determined from the kernel, however, this is not possible on some ar- chitectures or kernels, so one may need to specify these manually. One can specify 3 out of the 4 cache geometric parameters, these are as follows: --l1cache-line-size N specify the level 1 cache line size (in bytes) --l1cache-method [ forward | random | reverse ] select the method of exercising a l1cache sized buffer. The default is a forward scan, random picks random bytes to ex- ercise, reverse scans in reverse. --l1cache-mlock attempt to mlock(2) the l1cache size buffer into memory to prevent it from being swapped out. --l1cache-ops N specify the number of cache read/write bogo-op loops to run --l1cache-sets N specify the number of level 1 cache sets --l1cache-size N specify the level 1 cache size (in bytes) --l1cache-ways N specify the number of level 1 cache ways Landlock stressor (Linux >= 5.13) --landlock N start N workers that exercise Linux 5.13 landlocking. A range of landlock_create_ruleset(2) flags are exercised with a read only file rule to see if a directory can be ac- cessed and a read-write file create can be blocked. Each ruleset attempt is exercised in a new child context and this is the limiting factor on the speed of the stressor. --landlock-ops N stop the landlock stressors after N landlock ruleset bogo operations. File lease stressor --lease N start N workers locking, unlocking and breaking leases via the fcntl(2) F_SETLEASE operation. The parent processes continually lock and unlock a lease on a file while a user selectable number of child processes open the file with a non-blocking open to generate SIGIO lease breaking notifi- cations to the parent. This stressor is only available if F_SETLEASE, F_WRLCK and F_UNLCK support is provided by fc- ntl(2). --lease-breakers N start N lease breaker child processes per lease worker. Normally one child is plenty to force many SIGIO lease breaking notification signals to the parent, however, this option allows one to specify more child processes if re- quired. --lease-ops N stop lease workers after N bogo operations. LED stressor (Linux) --led N start N workers that exercise the /sys/class/leds inter- faces to set LED brightness levels and the various trigger settings. This needs to be run with root privilege to be able to write to these settings successfully. Non-root privilege will ignore failed writes. --led-ops N stop after N interfaces are exercised. Hardlink stressor --link N start N workers creating and removing hardlinks. --link-ops N stop link stress workers after N bogo operations. --link-sync sync dirty data and metadata to disk. List data structures stressor --list N start N workers that exercise list data structures. The de- fault is to add, find and remove 5000 64 bit integers into circleq (doubly linked circle queue), list (doubly linked list), slist (singly linked list), slistt (singly linked list using tail), stailq (singly linked tail queue) and tailq (doubly linked tail queue) lists. The intention of this stressor is to exercise memory and cache with the var- ious list operations. --list-method [ all | circleq | list | slist | stailq | tailq ] specify the list to be used. By default, all the list meth- ods are used (the `all' option). --list-ops N stop list stressors after N bogo ops. A bogo op covers the addition, finding and removing all the items into the list(s). --list-size N specify the size of the list, where N is the number of 64 bit integers to be added into the list. Last level of cache stressor --llc-affinity N start N workers that exercise the last level of cache (LLC) by read/write activity across a LLC sized buffer and then changing CPU affinity after each round of read/writes. This can cause non-local memory stalls and LLC read/write misses. --llc-affinity-clflush where possible, flush cachelines after each cacheline write, x86 and ppc64 only. --llc-affinity-mlock attempt to mlock(2) the LLC sized buffer into memory to prevent it from being swapped out. --llc-affinity-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --llc-affinity-ops N stop after N rounds of LLC read/writes. --llc-affinity-size N override the default LLC cache size setting to N bytes. One can specify the in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. Load average (loadavg) stressor --loadavg N start N workers that attempt to create thousands of pthreads that run at the lowest nice priority to force very high load averages. Linux systems will also perform some I/O writes as pending I/O is also factored into system load accounting. --loadavg-max N set the maximum number of pthreads to create to N. N may be reduced if there is as system limit on the number of pthreads that can be created. --loadavg-ops N stop loadavg workers after N bogo scheduling yields by the pthreads have been reached. Lock and increment memory stressor (x86 and ARM) --lockbus N start N workers that rapidly lock and increment 64 bytes of randomly chosen memory from a 16 MB mmap'd region (Intel x86 and ARM CPUs only). This will cause cacheline misses and stalling of CPUs. Pages are spread randomly across NUMA nodes to exercise NUMA bus locking for NUMA systems. --lockbus-nosplit disable split locks that lock across cache line boundaries. --lockbus-ops N stop lockbus workers after N bogo operations. POSIX lock (F_SETLK/F_GETLK) stressor --locka N start N workers that randomly lock and unlock regions of a file using the POSIX advisory locking mechanism (see fc- ntl(2), F_SETLK, F_GETLK). Each worker creates a 1024 KB file and attempts to hold a maximum of 1024 concurrent locks with a child process that also tries to hold 1024 concurrent locks. Old locks are unlocked in a first-in, first-out basis. --locka-ops N stop locka workers after N bogo locka operations. POSIX lock (lockf) stressor --lockf N start N workers that randomly lock and unlock regions of a file using the POSIX lockf(3) locking mechanism. Each worker creates a 64 KB file and attempts to hold a maximum of 1024 concurrent locks with a child process that also tries to hold 1024 concurrent locks. Old locks are unlocked in a first-in, first-out basis. --lockf-nonblock instead of using blocking F_LOCK lockf(3) commands, use non-blocking F_TLOCK commands and re-try if the lock failed. This creates extra system call overhead and CPU utilisation as the number of lockf workers increases and should increase locking contention. --lockf-ops N stop lockf workers after N bogo lockf operations. mixed file lock stressor (locka, lockf, lockofd) --lockmix N start N workers that randomly lock and unlock regions of a file using the BSD flock(2), locka (advisory), POSIX lockf(3) and Linux open file lock (lockofd) locking mecha- nisms. Each worker creates a 1024 KB file and attempts to hold a maximum of 1024 concurrent locks with a child process that also tries to hold 1024 concurrent locks. Old locks are unlocked in a first-in, first-out basis. --lockmix-ops N stop lockmix workers after N bogo lockmix operations. Linux open file lock (ofd F_OFD_SETLK/F_OFD_GETLK) stressor --lockofd N start N workers that randomly lock and unlock regions of a file using the Linux open file description locks (see fc- ntl(2), F_OFD_SETLK, F_OFD_GETLK). Each worker creates a 1024 KB file and attempts to hold a maximum of 1024 concur- rent locks with a child process that also tries to hold 1024 concurrent locks. Old locks are unlocked in a first- in, first-out basis. --lockofd-ops N stop lockofd workers after N bogo lockofd operations. Logarithmic functions --logmath N start N workers that exercise various libm logarithmic functions with input values 1 to 10000. Results are sanity checked to ensure no variation occurs after each round of 10000 computations. --logmath-ops N stop after N logarithmic bogo-operation loops. --logmath-method method specify a logarithmic function to exercise. Available loga- rithmic stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below logarithmic functions methods clog double complex natural logarithm clogf float complex natural logarithm clogl long double complex natural logarithm log double natural logarithm logf float natural logarithm logl long double natural logarithm logb get exponent of a double logbf get exponent of a float logbl get exponent of a long double log10 double base-10 logarithm log10f float base-10 logarithm log10l long double base-10 logarithm log2 double base-2 logarithm log2f float base-2 logarithm log2l long double base-2 logarithm Long jump (longjmp) stressor --longjmp N start N workers that exercise setjmp(3)/longjmp(3) by rapid looping on longjmp calls. --longjmp-ops N stop longjmp stress workers after N bogo longjmp operations (1 bogo op is 1000 longjmp calls). Loopback stressor (Linux) --loop N start N workers that exercise the loopback control device. This creates 2 MB loopback devices, expands them to 4 MB, performs some loopback status information get and set oper- ations and then destroys them. Linux only and requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability. --loop-ops N stop after N bogo loopback creation/deletion operations. Linear search stressor --lsearch N start N workers that linear search a unsorted array of 32 bit integers using lsearch(3). By default, there are 8192 elements in the array. This is a useful method to exercise sequential access of memory and processor cache. --lsearch-method [ lsearch-libc | lsearch-nonlibc | lsearch-sen- tinel ] select either the libc implementation of lsearch or a slightly optimized non-libc implementation of lsearch or a lsearch that uses the search key as the end of array sen- tinel to remove an index compare per loop. The default is the libc implementation if it exists, otherwise the non- libc version. --lsearch-ops N stop the lsearch workers after N bogo lsearch operations are completed. --lsearch-size N specify the size (number of 32 bit integers) in the array to lsearch. Size can be from 1 K to 4 M. Linux Security Modules system call stressor --lsm N start N workers that exercise the LSM system calls lsm_list_modules(2) and lsm_get_self_attr(2), (Linux only). Each bogo-op loop fetches a list of available security mod- ules and fetching LSM attributes as well as some invalid LSM system calls to exercise error handling. --lsm-ops N stop after N loops of fetching security modules lists and fetching LSM attributes. Madvise stressor --madvise N start N workers that apply random madvise(2) advise set- tings on pages of a 4 MB file backed shared memory mapping. --madvise-hwpoison enable MADV_HWPOISON page poisoning (if available, only when run as root). This will page poison a few pages and will cause kernel error messages to be reported. --madvise-ops N stop madvise stressors after N bogo madvise operations. Memory allocation stressor --malloc N start N workers continuously calling malloc(3), calloc(3), realloc(3), posix_memalign(3), aligned_alloc(3), mema- lign(3) and free(3). By default, up to 65536 allocations can be active at any point, but this can be altered with the --malloc-max option. Allocation, reallocation and freeing are chosen at random; 50% of the time memory is al- location (via one of malloc, calloc or realloc, posix_mema- lign, aligned_alloc, memalign) and 50% of the time alloca- tions are free'd. Allocation sizes are also random, with the maximum allocation size controlled by the --mal- loc-bytes option, the default size being 64 K. The worker is re-started if it is killed by the out of memory (OOM) killer. --malloc-bytes N maximum per allocation/reallocation size. Allocations are randomly selected from 1 to N bytes. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. Large allocation sizes cause the memory allocator to use mmap(2) rather than expanding the heap using brk(2). --malloc-max N maximum number of active allocations allowed. Allocations are chosen at random and placed in an allocation slot. Be- cause about 50%/50% split between allocation and freeing, typically half of the allocation slots are in use at any one time. --malloc-mlock attempt to mlock(2) the allocations into memory to prevent them from being swapped out. --malloc-ops N stop after N malloc bogo operations. One bogo operations relates to a successful malloc(3), calloc(3), realloc(3), posix_memalign(3), aligned_alloc(3) or memalign(3) call. --malloc-pthreads N specify number of malloc stressing concurrent pthreads to run. The default is 0 (just one main process, no pthreads). This option will do nothing if pthreads are not supported. --malloc-thresh N specify the threshold where malloc uses mmap(2) instead of sbrk(2) to allocate more memory. This is only available on systems that provide the GNU C mallopt(3) tuning function. --malloc-touch touch every allocated page to force pages to be populated in memory. This will increase the memory pressure and exer- cise the virtual memory harder. By default the malloc stressor will madvise pages into memory or use mincore to check for non-resident memory pages and try to force them into memory; this option aggressively forces pages to be memory resident. --malloc-trim periodically trim memory allocation by attempting to re- lease free memory from the heap every 65536 allocation it- erations. This can be a time consuming operation. It is only available with libc malloc implementations that sup- port malloc_trim(3). --malloc-zerofree zero allocated memory before free'ing. This can be useful in touching broken allocations and triggering failures. Also useful for forcing extra cache/memory writes. 2D Matrix stressor --matrix N start N workers that perform various matrix operations on floating point values. Testing on 64 bit x86 hardware shows that this provides a good mix of memory, cache and floating point operations and is an excellent way to make a CPU run hot. By default, this will exercise all the matrix stress meth- ods one by one on a 128 x 128 element matrix. One can spec- ify a specific matrix stress method with the --ma- trix-method option. --matrix-method method specify a matrix stress method. Available matrix stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below matrix stress methods add add two N x N matrices copy copy one N x N matrix to another div divide an N x N matrix by a scalar frobenius Frobenius product of two N x N matrices hadamard Hadamard product of two N x N matrices identity create an N x N identity matrix mean arithmetic mean of two N x N matrices mult multiply an N x N matrix by a scalar negate negate an N x N matrix prod product of two N x N matrices sub subtract one N x N matrix from another N x N ma- trix square multiply an N x N matrix by itself trans transpose an N x N matrix zero zero an N x N matrix --matrix-ops N stop matrix stress workers after N bogo operations. --matrix-size N specify the N x N size of the matrices. Smaller values re- sult in a floating point compute throughput bound stressor, where as large values result in a cache and/or memory band- width bound stressor. --matrix-yx perform matrix operations in order y by x rather than the default x by y. This is suboptimal ordering compared to the default and will perform more data cache stalls. 3D Matrix stressor --matrix-3d N start N workers that perform various 3D matrix operations on floating point values. Testing on 64 bit x86 hardware shows that this provides a good mix of memory, cache and floating point operations and is an excellent way to make a CPU run hot. By default, this will exercise all the 3D matrix stress methods one by one on a 128 x 128 x 128 element matrix. One can specify a specific 3D matrix stress method with the --matrix-3d-method option. --matrix-3d-method method specify a 3D matrix stress method. Available 3D matrix stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below matrix stress methods add add two N x N x N matrices copy copy one N x N x N matrix to another div divide an N x N x N matrix by a scalar frobenius Frobenius product of two N x N x N matrices hadamard Hadamard product of two N x N x N matrices identity create an N x N x N identity matrix mean arithmetic mean of two N x N x N matrices mult multiply an N x N x N matrix by a scalar negate negate an N x N x N matrix sub subtract one N x N x N matrix from another N x N x N matrix trans transpose an N x N x N matrix zero zero an N x N x N matrix --matrix-3d-ops N stop the 3D matrix stress workers after N bogo operations. --matrix-3d-size N specify the N x N x N size of the matrices. Smaller values result in a floating point compute throughput bound stres- sor, where as large values result in a cache and/or memory bandwidth bound stressor. --matrix-3d-zyx perform matrix operations in order z by y by x rather than the default x by y by z. This is suboptimal ordering com- pared to the default and will perform more data cache stalls. Memory contention stressor --mcontend N start N workers that produce memory contention read/write patterns. Each stressor runs with 5 threads that read and write to two different mappings of the same underlying physical page. Various caching operations are also exer- cised to cause sub-optimal memory access patterns. The threads also randomly change CPU affinity to exercise CPU and memory migration stress. --mcontend-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mcontend-ops N stop mcontend stressors after N bogo read/write operations. Memory barrier stressor (Linux) --membarrier N start N workers that exercise the membarrier(2) system call (Linux only). --membarrier-ops N stop membarrier stress workers after N bogo membarrier op- erations. Memory copy (memcpy) stressor --memcpy N start N workers that copies data to and from a buffer using memcpy(3) and then move the data in the buffer with mem- move(3) with 3 different alignments. This will exercise the data cache and memory copying. --memcpy-method [ all | libc | builtin | naive | naive_o0 .. naive_o3 ] specify a memcpy copying method. Available memcpy methods are described as follows: Method Description all use libc, builtin and naive methods libc use libc memcpy and memmove functions, this is the default builtin use the compiler built in optimized memcpy and memmove functions naive use naive byte by byte copying and memory moving build with default compiler optimization flags naive_o0 use unoptimized naive byte by byte copying and memory moving naive_o1 use unoptimized naive byte by byte copying and memory moving with -O1 optimization naive_o2 use optimized naive byte by byte copying and mem- ory moving build with -O2 optimization and where possible use CPU specific optimizations naive_o3 use optimized naive byte by byte copying and mem- ory moving build with -O3 optimization and where possible use CPU specific optimizations --memcpy-ops N stop memcpy stress workers after N bogo memcpy operations. Anonymous file (memfd) stressor --memfd N start N workers that create allocations of 1024 pages using memfd_create(2) and ftruncate(2) for allocation and mmap(2) to map the allocation into the process address space. (Linux only). --memfd-bytes N allocate N bytes per memfd stress worker, the default is 256 MB. One can specify the size in as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes us- ing the suffix b, k, m or g. --memfd-fds N create N memfd file descriptors, the default is 256. One can select 8 to 4096 memfd file descriptions with this op- tion. --memfd-madvise enable random madvise page advice on memfd memory mapped regions to add a little more VM exercising. --memfd-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --memfd-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --memfd-ops N stop after N memfd-create(2) bogo operations. --memfd-zap-pte exercise zapping page-table-entries to try to reproduce a Linux kernel bug that was fixed by commit 5abfd71d936a8aefd9f9ccd299dea7a164a5d455 "mm: don't skip swap entry even if zap_details specified". This will slow the stressor down significantly and hence is an opt-in memfd stressor option. Memory hotplug stressor (Linux) --memhotplug N start N workers that offline and online memory hotplug re- gions. Linux only and requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN capabilities. --memhotplug-mmap enable random 1 K to 1 MB memory mapping/unmappings before each offline event. --memhotplug-ops N stop memhotplug stressors after N memory offline and online bogo operations. Memory read/write stressor --memrate N start N workers that exercise a buffer with 1024, 512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16 and 8 bit reads and writes. 1024, 512 and 256 reads and writes are available with compilers that sup- port integer vectors. x86-64 cpus that support uncached (non-temporal "nt") writes also exercise 128, 64 and 32 writes providing higher write rates than the normal cached writes. x86-64 also exercises repeated string stores using 64, 32, 16 and 8 bit writes. CPUs that support prefetching reads also exercise 64 prefetched "pf" reads. This memory stressor allows one to also specify the maximum read and write rates. The stressors will run at maximum speed if no read or write rates are specified. --memrate-bytes N specify the size of the memory buffer being exercised. The default size is 256 MB. One can specify the size in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g, or cache sizes with L1, L2, L3 or LLC (lower level cache size). --memrate-flush flush cache between each memory exercising test to remove caching benefits in memory rate metrics. --memrate-method specify a memrate stress method, some methods are available to specific architectures or toolchains that support them. Available memrate stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below memrate methods read128pf read 128 bits per read using prefetching read64pf read 64 bits per read using prefetching read1024 read a vector of 1024 bits per read read512 read a vector of 512 bits per read read256 read a vector of 256 bits per read read128 read 128 bits per read read64 read 64 bits per read read32 read 32 bits per read read16 read 16 bits per read read8 read 8 bits per read write64stoq write 64 bits per write with x86 rep stoq write32stow write 32 bits per write with x86 rep stow write16stod write 16 bits per write with x86 rep stod write8stob write 8 bits per write with x86 rep stob write64ds write 64 bits per write with x86 movdiri write128nt write 128 bits per write using non-temporal store write64nt write 64 bits per write using non-temporal store write32nt write 32 bits per write using non-temporal store write1024 write a vector of 1024 bits per write write512 write a vector of 512 bits per write write256 write a vector of 256 bits per write write128 write 128 bits per write write64 write 64 bits per write write32 write 32 bits per write write16 write 16 bits per write write8 write 8 bits per write memset write using libc memset --memrate-ops N stop after N bogo memrate operations. --memrate-rd-mbs N specify the maximum allowed read rate in MB/sec. The actual read rate is dependent on scheduling jitter and memory ac- cesses from other running processes. Setting this to zero will disable reads. --memrate-wr-mbs N specify the maximum allowed read rate in MB/sec. The actual write rate is dependent on scheduling jitter and memory ac- cesses from other running processes. Setting this to zero will disable writes. Memory thrash stressor --memthrash N start N workers that thrash and exercise a 16 MB buffer in various ways to try and trip thermal overrun. Each stres- sor will start 1 or more threads. The number of threads is chosen so that there will be at least 1 thread per CPU. Note that the optimal choice for N is a value that divides into the number of CPUs. --memthrash-method method specify a memthrash stress method. Available memthrash stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below memthrash methods chunk1 memset 1 byte chunks of random data into ran- dom locations chunk8 memset 8 byte chunks of random data into ran- dom locations chunk64 memset 64 byte chunks of random data into ran- dom locations chunk256 memset 256 byte chunks of random data into random locations chunkpage memset page size chunks of random data into random locations copy128 copy 128 byte chunks from chunk N + 1 to chunk N with streaming reads and writes with 128 bit memory accesses where possible. flip flip (invert) all bits in random locations flush flush cache line in random locations lock lock randomly choosing locations (Intel x86 and ARM CPUs only) matrix treat memory as a 2 x 2 matrix and swap random elements memmove copy all the data in buffer to the next memory location memset memset the memory with random data memset64 memset the memory with a random 64 bit value in 64 byte chunks using non-temporal stores if possible or normal stores as a fallback memsetstosd memset the memory using x86 32 bit rep stosd instruction (x86 only) mfence stores with write serialization numa memory bind pages across numa nodes prefetch prefetch data at random memory locations random randomly run any of the memthrash methods ex- cept for `random' and `all' reverse swap 8 bit values from start to end and work towards the middle spinread spin loop read the same random location 2^19 times spinwrite spin loop write the same random location 2^19 times swap step through memory swapping bytes in steps of 65 and 129 byte strides swap64 work through memory swapping adjacent 64 byte chunks swapfwdrev swap 64 bit values from start to end and work towards the middle and then from end to start and work towards the middle. tlb work through memory in sub-optimial strides of prime multiples of the cache line size with reads and then writes to cause Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) misses. --memthrash-ops N stop after N memthrash bogo operations. BSD mergesort stressor --mergesort N start N workers that sort 32 bit integers using the BSD mergesort(3). --mergesort-method [ mergesort-libc | mergesort-nonlibc ] select either the libc implementation of mergesort or an unoptimized implementation of mergesort. The default is the libc implementation if it is available. --mergesort-ops N stop mergesort stress workers after N bogo mergesorts. --mergesort-size N specify number of 32 bit integers to sort, default is 262144 (256 x 1024). File metadata mix --metamix N start N workers that generate a file metadata mix of opera- tions. Each stressor runs 16 concurrent processes that each exercise a file's metadata with sequences of open, 256 lseeks and writes, fdatasync, close, fsync and then stat, open, 256 lseeks, reads, occasional file memory mapping, close, unlink and lstat. --metamix-bytes N set the size of metamix files, the default is 1 MB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suf- fix b, k, m or g. --metamix-ops N stop the metamix stressor after N bogo metafile operations. Resident memory (mincore) stressor --mincore N start N workers that walk through all of memory 1 page at a time checking if the page mapped and also is resident in memory using mincore(2). It also maps and unmaps a page to check if the page is mapped or not using mincore(2). --mincore-ops N stop after N mincore bogo operations. One mincore bogo op is equivalent to a 300 mincore(2) calls. --mincore-random instead of walking through pages sequentially, select pages at random. The chosen address is iterated over by shifting it right one place and checked by mincore until the address is less or equal to the page size. Minimum sleep time in nanosleep stressor --min-nanosleep N start M workers that exercise nanosecond sleeps using pow- ers of two nanosecond sleep delays. Once all the instances have completed, the minimum, maximum and mean sleep times are reported for the sleep delays across all the min- nanosleep stressor instances. --min-nanosleep-ops N stop after N rounds of measurements across all the sleeps are completed. --min-nanosleep-max N set the maximum nanosleep delay to use. If this is not a power of two then the previous power of two nanosecond de- lay time is used, e.g. specifying 10000 will select 8192 nanoseconds. --min-nanosleep-sched [ batch | deadline | ext | fifo | idle | other | rr ] select scheduling policy. Note that deadline, fifo and rr require root privilege. Misaligned read/write stressor --misaligned N start N workers that perform misaligned read and writes. By default, this will exercise 128 bit misaligned read and writes in 8 x 16 bits, 4 x 32 bits, 2 x 64 bits and 1 x 128 bits at the start of a page boundary, at the end of a page boundary and over a cache boundary. Misaligned read and writes operate at 1 byte offset from the natural alignment of the data type. On some architectures this can cause SIG- BUS, SIGILL or SIGSEGV, these are handled and the mis- aligned stressor method causing the error is disabled. --misaligned-method method Available misaligned stress methods are described as fol- lows: Method Description all iterate over all the following misaligned methods int16rd 8 x 16 bit integer reads int16wr 8 x 16 bit integer writes int16inc 8 x 16 bit integer increments int16atomic 8 x 16 bit atomic integer increments int32rd 4 x 32 bit integer reads int32wr 4 x 32 bit integer writes int32wtnt 4 x 32 bit non-temporal stores (x86 only) int32inc 4 x 32 bit integer increments int32atomic 4 x 32 bit atomic integer increments int64rd 2 x 64 bit integer reads int64wr 2 x 64 bit integer writes int64wrds 4 x 64 bit direct stores (x86 only) int64wtnt 4 x 64 bit non-temporal stores (x86 only) int64inc 2 x 64 bit integer increments int64atomic 2 x 64 bit atomic integer increments int128rd 1 x 128 bit integer reads int128wr 1 x 128 bit integer writes int128inc 1 x 128 bit integer increments int128atomic 1 x 128 bit atomic integer increments Note that some of these options (128 bit integer and/or atomic op- erations) may not be available on some systems. --misaligned-ops N stop after N misaligned bogo operation. A misaligned bogo op is equivalent to 65536 x 128 bit reads or writes. Mknod/unlink stressor --mknod N start N workers that create and remove fifos, empty files and named sockets using mknod(2) and unlink(2). --mknod-ops N stop directory thrash workers after N bogo mknod opera- tions. Memory mapped pages lock/unlock stressor --mlock N start N workers that lock and unlock memory mapped pages using mlock(2), munlock(2), mlockall(2) and munlockall(2). This is achieved by the mapping of three contiguous pages and then locking the second page, hence ensuring non-con- tiguous pages are locked . This is then repeated until the maximum allowed mlocks or a maximum of 262144 mappings are made. Next, all future mappings are mlocked and the worker attempts to map 262144 pages, then all pages are munlocked and the pages are unmapped. --mlock-ops N stop after N mlock bogo operations. Many child memory mapped page lock/unlock process stressor --mlockmany N start N workers that fork off a default of 1024 child processes in total; each child will attempt to anonymously mmap(2) and mlock(2) the maximum allowed mlockable memory size. The stress test attempts to avoid swapping by track- ing low memory and swap allocations (but some swapping may occur). Once either the maximum number of child process is reached or all mlockable in-core memory is locked then child processes are killed and the stress test is repeated. --mlockmany-ops N stop after N mlockmany (mmap and mlock) operations. --mlockmany-procs N set the number of child processes to create per stressor. The default is to start a maximum of 1024 child processes in total across all the stressors. This option allows the setting of N child processes per stressor. Memory mapping (mmap/munmap) stressor --mmap N start N workers continuously calling mmap(2)/munmap(2). The initial mapping is a large chunk (size specified by --mmap-bytes) followed by pseudo-random 4 K unmappings, then pseudo-random 4 K mappings, and then linear 4 K unmap- pings. Note that this can cause systems to trip the kernel OOM killer on Linux systems if not enough physical memory and swap is not available. The MAP_POPULATE option is used to populate pages into memory on systems that support this. By default, anonymous mappings are used, however, the --mmap-file and --mmap-async options allow one to perform file based mappings if desired. Note that since stress-ng 0.17.05 the --mmap-madvise, --mmap-mergeable, --mmap-mprotect, --mmap-slow-munmap and --mmap-write-check options should be used to enable the pre-0.17.05 mmap stressor behaviour. --mmap-async enable file based memory mapping and use asynchronous msync'ing on each page, see --mmap-file. --mmap-bytes N allocate N bytes in total for all the mmap stressor in- stances, the default is 256 MB. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --mmap-file enable file based memory mapping and by default use syn- chronous msync'ing on each page. --mmap-madvise enable randomized madvise(2) settings on pages. --mmap-mergeable mark pages as mergeable via madvise(2) where possible. --mmap-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --mmap-mmap2 use mmap2(2) for 4 K page aligned offsets if mmap2 is available, otherwise fall back to mmap. --mmap-mprotect change protection settings on each page of memory. Each time a page or a group of pages are mapped or remapped then this option will make the pages read-only, write-only, exec-only, and read-write. --mmap-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mmap-odirect enable file based memory mapping and use O_DIRECT direct I/O. --mmap-ops N stop mmap stress workers after N bogo operations. --mmap-osync enable file based memory mapping and used O_SYNC synchro- nous I/O integrity completion. --mmap-slow-munmap enable page-by-page memory unmapping rather than attempting to memory unmap contiguous pages in one large unmapping. This can cause lock contention when running with many con- current mmap stressors and will slow down the stressor. --mmap-stressful enable --mmap-file, --mmap-madvise, --mmap-mergeable, --mmap-mlock, --mmap-mprotect, --mmap-odirect, --mmap-slow-munmap --mmap-write-check write into each page a unique 64 bit check value for all pages and then read the value for a sanity check. This will force newly memory mapped pages to be faulted-in which slows down mmap bogo-op rate. This can also cause lock con- tention on page allocation and page unmapping on systems with many CPU threads and with cgroup memory accounting. Random memory map/unmap stressor --mmapaddr N start N workers that memory map pages at a random memory location that is not already mapped. On 64 bit machines the random address is randomly chosen 32 bit or 64 bit ad- dress. If the mapping works a second page is memory mapped from the first mapped address. The stressor exercises mmap/munmap, mincore and segfault handling. --mmapaddr-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --mmapaddr-ops N stop after N random address mmap bogo operations. Memory map Copy-on-Write and unmap stressor --mmapcow N start N workers that exercise page allocation, modification (forcing copy-on-write) and page unmapping. Regions of mem- ory from 1 page to the maximum mappable size are allocated. Each page in the regions are then modified, cache flushed (where possible) and unmapped. This stressor produces a high page fault rate. For each region mapped there are 6 different randomized strategies taken to exercise each page: Sequential page modify and unmap Sequential page modify and unmap (even pages, then odd pages) Prime size page strides, page modify and unmap Reverse sequential page modify and unmap Reverse sequential page modify and unmap (even pages, then odd pages) Single random page modify and unmap all pages Randomly selected page modify and modify --mmapcow-fork fork child process to exercise pages in parallel with par- ent to exercise page handling harder. --mmapcow-free after each page is modified and before each page is un- mapped use madvise(2) MADV_FREE (if it is available) to in- dicate the page is free --mmapcow-mlock attempt to mlock(2) each modified page, this can increase the number of page faults. Only available with the mlock2 system call. --mmapcow-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mmapcow-ops N stop after N pages are modified and unmapped Forked memory map stressor --mmapfork N start N workers that each fork off 32 child processes, each of which tries to allocate some of the free memory left in the system (and trying to avoid any swapping). The child processes then hint that the allocation will be needed with madvise(2) and then memset it to zero and hint that it is no longer needed with madvise before exiting. This pro- duces significant amounts of VM activity, a lot of cache misses and with minimal swapping. --mmapfork-bytes N specify the size of memory mapped fork region size. One can specify the size in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --mmapfork-ops N stop after N mmapfork bogo operations. Memory map files stressor --mmapfiles N start N workers that attempt to memory map and then unmap up to 512 x 1024 files into memory. The stressor will tra- verse /lib, /lib32, /lib64, /boot, /bin, /etc, /sbin, /usr, /var, /sys and /proc and attempt to memory map files in these directories. Note that mapping bogo-ops rate will de- pend on the speed of access to files on these file systems. --mmapfiles-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mmapfiles-ops N stop after N memory map/unmap operations. --mmapfiles-populate The default is to perform a memory mapping and not fault any pages into physical memory. This option uses MAP_POPU- LATE when available and will also read the first byte in each page to ensure pages are faulted into memory to force memory population from file. --mmapfiles-shared The default is for private memory mapped files, however, with this option will use shared memory mappings. Fixed address memory map stressor --mmapfixed N start N workers that perform fixed address allocations from the top virtual address down to 128 K. The allocated sizes are from 1 page to 8 pages and various random mmap flags are used MAP_SHARED/MAP_PRIVATE, MAP_LOCKED, MAP_NORESERVE, MAP_POPULATE. If successfully map'd then the allocation is remap'd first to a large range of addresses based on a ran- dom start and finally an address that is several pages higher in memory. Mappings and remappings are madvised with random madvise options to further exercise the mappings. --mmapfixed-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --mmapfixed-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mmapfixed-ops N stop after N mmapfixed memory mapping bogo operations. Huge page memory mapping stressor --mmaphuge N start N workers that attempt to mmap a set of huge pages and large huge page sized mappings. Successful mappings are madvised with MADV_NOHUGEPAGE and MADV_HUGEPAGE settings and then 1/64th of the normal small page size pages are touched. Finally, an attempt to unmap a small page size page at the end of the mapping is made (these may fail on huge pages) before the set of pages are unmapped. By de- fault 8192 mappings are attempted per round of mappings or until swapping is detected. --mmaphuge-file attempt to mmap on a 16 MB temporary file and random 4 K offsets. If this fails, anonymous mappings are used in- stead. --mmaphuge-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd huge pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --mmaphuge-mmaps N set the number of huge page mappings to attempt in each round of mappings. The default is 8192 mappings. --mmaphuge-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mmaphuge-ops N stop after N mmaphuge bogo operations Maximum memory mapping per process stressor --mmapmany N start N workers that attempt to create the maximum allowed per-process memory mappings. This is achieved by mapping 3 contiguous pages and then unmapping the middle page hence splitting the mapping into two. This is then repeated until the maximum allowed mappings or a maximum of 262144 map- pings are made. --mmapmany-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd huge pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --mmapmany-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mmapmany-ops N stop after N mmapmany bogo operations Memory map random mapping operations --mmaprandom N start N workers that exercise a random mix of memory map related system calls on randonmly sized mappings. The map- pings are either anonymous mapped or file mapped (on a small file or on a memfd file where available). This exer- cises mmap(2) (random options and flags), munmap(2), mlock(2), munlock(2), madvise(2), posix_madvise(3), min- core(2), mremap(2), msync(2), mprotect(2), remap_file_pages(2), memory read, memory write and cache flushing. Where possible, randomized options are used to generate a mix of mostly valid (and some invalid) memory mapping operations. Metrics are reported for all successful system calls and memory operations. --mmaprandom-ops N stop after N random memory mapping bogo-operations. Gener- ally, 1 bogo-op is one memory related system call (except for read/write/cache operations). --mmaprandom-mappings N select maximum number of memory mappings, the default is 1024, range 1 to 65536. --mmaprandom-maxpages N select maximum number of pages to be memory mapped, the de- fault is 8, range 2 to 1024. The pages mapped are randomly chosen from 1 to maxpages. --mmaprandom-numa assign randomly chosen memory mapped pages to randomly se- lected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. Memory map torture stressor --mmaptorture N start N workers that exercise memory mapping operations on a shared file. Mappings of various random sizes are tor- tured with calls to madvise(2), mremap(2), mprotect(2), msync(2), mlock(2), munlock(2), mseal(2) and mincore(2) while the underlying file is modified by writes, truncation and hole punching. Mapped data is read and written and sync'd back to file. For NUMA systems, pages are randomly placed across NUMA nodes. All this activity causes cache misses, exercises the TLB and causes IPI interrupts between CPUs. --mmaptorture-bytes N allocate N bytes in total for all the mmaptorture stressor instances, the default is 256 MB. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --mmaptorture-msync N memory mapped pages are msync'd various times per bogo-op- eration, this option specifies the percentage amount of the pages per msync operation are msync'd. The default is 10%. Specifying zero will disabled msync'ing. --mmaptorture-ops N stop after N iterations of memory mapping torture opera- tions. Kernel module loading stressor (Linux) --module N start N workers that use finit_module() to load the module specified or the hello test module, if is available. There are different ways to test loading modules. Using modprobe calls in a loop, using the kernel kernel module autoloader, and this stress-ng module stressor. To stress tests mod- probe we can simply run the userspace modprobe program in a loop. To stress test the kernel module autoloader we can stress tests using the upstream kernel tools/testing/self- tests/kmod/kmod.sh. This ends up calling modprobe in the end, and it has its own caps built-in to self protect the kernel from too many requests at the same time. The user- space modprobe call will also prevent calls if the same module exists already. The stress-ng modules stressor is designed to help stress test the finit_module() system call even if the module is already loaded, testing races that are otherwise hard to reproduce. --module-name NAME NAME of the module to use, for example: test_module, xfs, ext4. By default test_module is used so CONFIG_TEST_LKM must be enabled in the kernel. The module dependencies must be loaded prior to running these stressor tests, as this stresses running finit_module() not using modprobe. --module-no-modver ignore module modversions when using finit_module(). --module-no-vermag ignore module versions when using finit_module(). --module-no-unload do not unload the module right after loading it with finit_module(). --module-ops N stop after N module load/unload cycles Monte Carlo computations of <pi> and e and various integrals --monte-carlo N start N stressors that compute <pi> and e (Euler's number) using Monte Carlo computational experiments with various random number generators. --monte-carlo-method [ all | e | exp | pi | sin | sqrt | squircle ] specify the computation to perform, options are as follows: Method Description all use all monte carlo computation methods e compute Euler's constant e exp integrate exp(x ^ 2) for x = 0..1 pi compute <pi> from the area of a circle sin integrate sin(x) for x = 0..<pi> sqrt integrate sqrt(1 + x ^ 4) for x = 0..1 squircle area of a unit squircle x ^ 4 + y ^ 4 = 1 --monte-carlo-ops N stop after Monte Carlo computation experiments --monte-carlo-rand [ all | drand48 | getrandom | lcg | pcg32 | mwc64 | random | xorshift ] specify the random number generator to use, options are as follows: Method Description all use all the random number generators arc4 use the libc cryptographically-secure pseudoran- dom arc4random(3) number generator. drand48 use the libc linear congruential algorithm drand48(3) using 48-bit integer arithmetic. getrandom use the getrandom(2) system call for random val- ues. lcg use a 32 bit Paker-Miller Linear Congruential Generator, with a division optimization. pcg32 use a 32 bit O'Neill Permuted Congruential Gen- erator. mwc64 use the 64 bit stress-ng Multiply With Carry random number generator. random use the libc random(3) Non-linear Additive Feed- back random number generator. xorshift use a 32 bit Marsaglia shift-register random number generator. --monte-carlo-samples N specify the number of random number samples to use to com- pute <pi> or e, default is 100000. Multi-precision floating operations (mpfr) stressor --mpfr N start N workers that exercise multi-precision floating point operations using the GNU Multi-Precision Floating Point Reliable library (mpfr). Operations computed are as follows: Method Description apery calculate Apery's constant <zeta>(3); the sum of 1/(n ^ 3). cosine compute cos(<theta>) for <theta> = 0 to 2<pi> in 100 steps. euler compute e using n = (1 + (1 / n)) ^ n. exp compute 1000 exponentials. log computer 1000 natural logarithms. omega compute the omega constant defined by <Omega>e^<Omega> = 1 using efficient iteration of <Omega>n+1 = (1 + <Omega>n) / (1 + e^<Omega>n). phi compute the Golden Ratio <phi> using series. sine compute sin(<theta>) for <theta> = 0 to 2<pi> in 100 steps. nsqrt compute square root using Newton-Raphson. --mpfr-ops N stop workers after N iterations of various multi-precision floating point operations. --mpfr-precision N specify the precision in binary digits of the floating point operations. The default is 1000 bits, the allowed range is 32 to 1000000 (very slow). Memory protection stressor --mprotect N start N workers that exercise changing page protection set- tings and access memory after each change. 8 processes per worker contend with each other changing page protection settings on a shared memory region of just a few pages to cause TLB flushes. A read and write to the pages can cause segmentation faults and these are handled by the stressor. All combinations of page protection settings are exercised including invalid combinations. --mprotect-ops N stop after N mprotect calls. POSIX message queue stressor (Linux) --mq N start N sender and receiver processes that continually send and receive messages using POSIX message queues. (Linux only). --mq-ops N stop after N bogo POSIX message send operations completed. --mq-size N specify size of POSIX message queue. The default size is 10 messages and most Linux systems this is the maximum allowed size for normal users. If the given size is greater than the allowed message queue size then a warning is issued and the maximum allowed size is used instead. Memory remap stressor (Linux) --mremap N start N workers continuously calling mmap(2), mremap(2) and munmap(2). The initial anonymous mapping is a large chunk (size specified by --mremap-bytes) and then iteratively halved in size by remapping all the way down to a page size and then back up to the original size. This worker is only available for Linux. --mremap-bytes N initially allocate N bytes per remap stress worker, the de- fault is 256 MB. One can specify the size in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --mremap-mlock attempt to mlock(2) remap'd pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --mreamp-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --mremap-ops N stop mremap stress workers after N bogo operations. Memory Sealing --mseal N start N memory sealing stressors that exercise madvise(2), mremap(2), mprotect(2) and mseal(2) operations on two pages of of memory mapped anonymous private memory. Linux 6.10+ kernels only. --mseal-ops N stop after N msealed memory operations. System V message IPC stressor --msg N start N sender and receiver processes that continually send and receive messages using System V message IPC. --msg-bytes N specify the size of the message being sent and received. Range 4 to 8192 bytes, default is 4 bytes. --msg-ops N stop after N bogo message send operations completed. --msg-types N select the quality of message types (mtype) to use. By de- fault, msgsnd sends messages with a mtype of 1, this option allows one to send messages types in the range 1..N to ex- ercise the message queue receive ordering. This will also impact throughput performance. Synchronize file with memory map (msync) stressor --msync N start N stressors that msync data from a file backed memory mapping from memory back to the file and msync modified data from the file back to the mapped memory. This exer- cises the msync(2) MS_SYNC and MS_INVALIDATE sync opera- tions. --msync-bytes N allocate N bytes for the memory mapped file, the default is 256 MB. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes us- ing the suffix b, k, m or g. --msync-ops N stop after N msync bogo operations completed. Synchronize file with memory map (msync) coherency stressor --msyncmany N start N stressors that memory map up to 32768 pages on the same page of a temporary file, change the first 32 bits in a page and msync the data back to the file. The other 32767 pages are examined to see if the 32 bit check value is msync'd back to these pages. --msyncmany-ops N stop after N msync calls in the msyncmany stressors are completed. ISO C mtx (mutex) stressor --mtx N start N stressors that exercise ISO C mutex locking and un- locking. --mtx-ops N stop after N bogo mutex lock/unlock operations. --mtx-procs N By default 2 threads are used for locking/unlocking on a single mutex. This option allows the default to be changed to 2 to 64 concurrent threads. Unmapping shared non-executable memory stressor (Linux) --munmap N start N stressors that exercise unmapping of shared non-ex- ecutable mapped regions of child processes (Linux only). The unmappings map shared memory regions page by page with a prime sized stride that creates many temporary mapping holes. One the unmappings are complete the child will exit and a new one is started. Note that this may trigger seg- mentation faults in the child process, these are handled where possible by forcing the child process to call _exit(2). --munmap-ops N stop after N page unmappings. Pthread mutex stressor --mutex N start N stressors that exercise pthread mutex locking and unlocking. If run with enough privilege then the FIFO scheduler is used and a random priority between 0 and 80% of the maximum FIFO priority level is selected for the locking operation. The minimum FIFO priority level is se- lected for the critical mutex section and unlocking opera- tion to exercise random inverted priority scheduling. --mutex-affinity enable random CPU affinity changing between mutex lock and unlock. --mutex-ops N stop after N bogo mutex lock/unlock operations. --mutex-procs N By default 2 threads are used for locking/unlocking on a single mutex. This option allows the default to be changed to 2 to 64 concurrent threads. High resolution and scheduler stressor via nanosleep calls --nanosleep N start N workers that each run pthreads that call nanosleep(2) with random delays from 1 to 2^18 nanoseconds. This should exercise the high resolution timers and sched- uler. --nanosleep-method [ all | cstate | random | ns | us | ms ] select the nanosleep sleep duration method. By default, cstate residency durations (if they exist) and random dura- tions are used. This option allows one to select one of the three methods: Method Description all use cstate and random nanosecond durations. cstate use cstate nanosecond durations. It is recommended to also use --nanosleep-threads 1 to exercise less conconcurrent nanosleeps to allow CPUs to drop into deep C states. random use random nanosecond durations between 1 and 2^18 nanoseconds. ns use 1ns (nanosecond) nanosleeps us use 1<mu>s (microsecond) nanosleeps ms use 1ms (millisecond) nanosleeps --nanosleep-ops N stop the nanosleep stressor after N bogo nanosleep opera- tions. --nanosleep-threads N specify the number of concurrent pthreads to run per stres- sor. The default is 8 and the allowed range is 1 to 1024. Network device ioctl stressor --netdev N start N workers that exercise various netdevice ioctl(2) commands across all the available network devices. The ioctls exercised by this stressor are as follows: SIOCGIF- CONF, SIOCGIFINDEX, SIOCGIFNAME, SIOCGIFFLAGS, SIOCGIFADDR, SIOCGIFNETMASK, SIOCGIFMETRIC, SIOCGIFMTU, SIOCGIFHWADDR, SIOCGIFMAP and SIOCGIFTXQLEN. See netdevice(7) for more de- tails of these ioctl commands. --netdev-ops N stop after N netdev bogo operations completed. Netlink proc stressor (Linux) --netlink-proc N start N workers that spawn child processes and monitor fork/exec/exit process events via the proc netlink connec- tor. Each event received is counted as a bogo op. This stressor can only be run on Linux and requires CAP_NET_AD- MIN capability. --netlink-proc-ops N stop the proc netlink connector stressors after N bogo ops. Netlink task stressor (Linux) --netlink-task N start N workers that collect task statistics via the netlink taskstats interface. This stressor can only be run on Linux and requires CAP_NET_ADMIN capability. --netlink-task-ops N stop the taskstats netlink connector stressors after N bogo ops. Nice stressor --nice N start N cpu consuming workers that exercise the available nice levels. Each iteration forks off a child process that runs through the all the nice levels running a busy loop for 0.1 seconds per level and then exits. --nice-ops N stop after N nice bogo nice loops NO-OP CPU instruction stressor --nop N start N workers that consume cpu cycles issuing no-op in- structions. This stressor is available if the assembler supports the "nop" instruction. --nop-instr INSTR use alternative nop instruction INSTR. For x86 CPUs INSTR can be one of nop, pause, nop2 (2 byte nop) through to nop15 (15 byte nop) and fnop. For ARM CPUs, INSTR can be one of nop or yield. For PPC64 CPUs, INSTR can be one of nop, mdoio, mdoom or yield. For S390 CPUs, INSTR can be one of nop or nopr. For other processors, INSTR is only nop. The random INSTR option selects a random mix of the avail- able nop instructions. If the chosen INSTR generates an SIGILL signal, then the stressor falls back to the vanilla nop instruction. --nop-ops N stop nop workers after N no-op bogo operations. Each bogo- operation is equivalent to 256 loops of 256 no-op instruc- tions. /dev/null stressor --null N start N workers that exercise /dev/null with write(2), lseek(2), ioctl(2), fcntl(2), fallocate(2) and fdatasync(2) calls. For just /dev/null write benchmarking use the --null-write option. --null-ops N stop null stress workers after N /dev/null bogo operations. --null-write just write to /dev/null with 4 K writes with no additional exercising on /dev/null. Migrate memory pages over NUMA nodes stressor --numa N start N workers that migrate stressors and a 4 MB memory mapped buffer around all the available NUMA nodes. This uses migrate_pages(2) to move the stressors and mbind(2) and move_pages(2) to move the pages of the mapped buffer. After each move, the buffer is written to force activity over the bus which results cache misses. This test will only run on hardware with NUMA enabled. --numa-bytes N specify the total number bytes to be exercised by all the workers, the given size is divided by the number of workers and rounded to the nearest page size. The default is 4 MB per worker. One can specify the size as % of total avail- able memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --numa-ops N stop NUMA stress workers after N bogo NUMA operations. --numa-shuffle-addr shuffle page order for the address list when calling move_pages(2) --numa-shuffle-node shuffle node order for the address list when calling move_pages(2) Large Pipe stressor --oom-pipe N start N workers that create as many pipes as allowed and exercise expanding and shrinking the pipes from the largest pipe size down to a page size. Data is written into the pipes and read out again to fill the pipe buffers. With the --aggressive mode enabled the data is not read out when the pipes are shrunk, causing the kernel to OOM processes ag- gressively. Running many instances of this stressor will force kernel to OOM processes due to the many large pipe buffer allocations. --oom-pipe-ops N stop after N bogo pipe expand/shrink operations. Illegal instructions stressors --opcode N start N workers that fork off children that execute ran- domly generated executable code. This will generate issues such as illegal instructions, bus errors, segmentation faults, traps, floating point errors that are handled gracefully by the stressor. --opcode-method [ inc | mixed | random | text ] select the opcode generation method. By default, random bytes are used to generate the executable code. This option allows one to select one of the three methods: Method Description inc use incrementing 32 bit opcode patterns from 0x00000000 to 0xfffffff inclusive. mixed use a mix of incrementing 32 bit opcode patterns and random 32 bit opcode patterns that are also in- verted, encoded with gray encoding and bit re- versed. random generate opcodes using random bytes from a mwc ran- dom generator. text copies random chunks of code from the stress-ng text segment and randomly flips single bits in a random choice of 1/8th of the code. --opcode-ops N stop after N attempts to execute illegal code. Opening file (open) stressor -o N, --open N start N workers that perform open(2) and then close(2) op- erations on /dev/zero. The maximum opens at one time is system defined, so the test will run up to this maximum, or 65536 open file descriptors, which ever comes first. --open-fd run a child process that scans /proc/$PID/fd and attempts to open the files that the stressor has opened. This exer- cises racing open/close operations on the proc interface. --open-max N try to open a maximum of N files (or up to the maximum per- process open file system limit). The value can be the num- ber of files or a percentage of the maximum per-process open file system limit. --open-ops N stop the open stress workers after N bogo open operations. Page table and TLB stressor --pagemove N start N workers that mmap a memory region (default 4 MB) and then shuffle pages to the virtual address of the previ- ous page. Each page shuffle uses 3 mremap operations to move a page. This exercises page tables and Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) flushing. --pagemove-bytes specify the size of the memory mapped region to be exer- cised. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes us- ing the suffix b, k, m or g. --pagemove-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd and mremap'd pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --pagemove-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --pagemove-ops N stop after N pagemove shuffling operations, where suffling all the pages in the mmap'd region is equivalent to 1 bogo- operation. Memory page swapping stressor --pageswap N start N workers that exercise page swap in and swap out. Pages are allocated and paged out using madvise(2) MADV_PA- GEOUT. One the maximum per process number of mmaps are reached or 65536 pages are allocated the pages are read to page them back in and unmapped in reverse mapping order. --pageswap-ops N stop after N page allocation bogo operations. PCI sysfs stressor (Linux) --pci N exercise PCI sysfs by running N workers that read data (and mmap/unmap PCI config or PCI resource files). Linux only. Running as root will allow config and resource mmappings to be read and exercises PCI I/O mapping. --pci-dev xxxx:xx:xx.x specify a PCI device to exercise rather than exercise all PCI devices. The device is specified using the PCI device name xxxx:xx:xx.x where x is a hexadecimal digit. --pci-ops N stop pci stress workers after N PCI subdirectory exercising operations. --pci-ops-rate N specify the PCI bogo-ops per second rate. This is useful for PCI bandwidth limiting and on x86 systems this may re- duce uncore transactions. Personality stressor --personality N start N workers that attempt to set personality and get all the available personality types (process execution domain types) via the personality(2) system call. (Linux only). --personality-ops N stop personality stress workers after N bogo personality operations. Mutex using Peterson algorithm stressor --peterson N start N workers that exercises mutex exclusion between two processes using shared memory with the Peterson Algorithm. Where possible this uses memory fencing and falls back to using GCC __sync_synchronize if they are not available. The stressors contain simple mutex and memory coherency sanity checks. --peterson-ops N stop peterson workers after N mutex operations. Page mmap stressor --physpage N start N workers that use /proc/self/pagemap and /proc/kpagecount to determine the physical page and page count of a virtual mapped page and a page that is shared among all the stressors. Linux only and requires the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capabilities. --physpage-mtrr enable setting various memory type rage register (MTRR) types on physical pages (Linux and x86 only). --physpage-ops N stop physpage stress workers after N bogo physical address lookups. Physical page mmap stressor (using /dev/mem) --physmmap N start N workers that try to mmap available System RAM (as specified by /proc/iomem) using /dev/mem and randomized private or shared pages. This requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN capa- bilities to fully read /proc/iomem and mmap onto /dev/mem. Note systems may be fully locked down and mmapping onto /dev/mem is impossible. --physmmap-ops N stop physmmap stress workers after N bogo mmap attempts. --physmmap-read perform 64 bit reads of all the data in each mmap'd page. Process signals (pidfd_send_signal) stressor --pidfd N start N workers that exercise signal sending via the pidfd_send_signal(2) system call. This stressor creates child processes and checks if they exist and can be stopped, restarted and killed using the pidfd_send_sig- nal(2) system call. --pidfd-ops N stop pidfd stress workers after N child processes have been created, tested and killed with pidfd_send_signal. Localhost ICMP (ping) stressor --ping-sock N start N workers that send small randomized ICMP messages to the localhost across a range of ports (1024..65535) using a "ping" socket with an AF_INET domain, a SOCK_DGRAM socket type and an IPPROTO_ICMP protocol. --ping-sock-ops N stop the ping-sock stress workers after N ICMP messages are sent. Large pipe stressor -p N, --pipe N start N workers that perform large pipe writes and reads to exercise pipe I/O. This exercises memory write and reads as well as context switching. Each worker has two processes, a reader and a writer. --pipe-data-size N specifies the size in bytes of each write to the pipe (range from 4 bytes to 4096 bytes). Setting a small data size will cause more writes to be buffered in the pipe, hence reducing the context switch rate between the pipe writer and pipe reader processes. Default size is the page size. --pipe-ops N stop pipe stress workers after N bogo pipe write opera- tions. --pipe-vmsplice use vmsplice(2) to splice data pages to/from pipe. Requires pipe packet mode using O_DIRECT and buffer twice the size of the pipe to ensure verification data sequences. --pipe-size N specifies the size of the pipe in bytes (for systems that support the F_SETPIPE_SZ fcntl() command). Setting a small pipe size will cause the pipe to fill and block more fre- quently, hence increasing the context switch rate between the pipe writer and the pipe reader processes. As of ver- sion 0.15.11 the default size is 4096 bytes. Shared pipe stressor --pipeherd N start N workers that pass a 64 bit token counter to/from 100 child processes over a shared pipe. This forces a high context switch rate and can trigger a "thundering herd" of wakeups on processes that are blocked on pipe waits. --pipeherd-ops N stop pipe stress workers after N bogo pipe write opera- tions. --pipeherd-yield force a scheduling yield after each write, this increases the context switch rate. Memory protection key mechanism stressor (Linux) --pkey N start N workers that change memory protection using a pro- tection key pkey(2) and the pkey_mprotect(2) call (Linux only). This will try to allocate a pkey and use this for the page protection, however, if this fails then the spe- cial pkey -1 will be used (and the kernel will use the nor- mal mprotect mechanism instead). Various page protection mixes of read/write/exec/none will be cycled through on randomly chosen pre-allocated pages. --pkey-ops N stop after N pkey_mprotect page protection cycles. Stress-ng plugin stressor --plugin N start N workers that run user provided stressor functions loaded from a shared library. The shared library can con- tain one or more stressor functions prefixed with stress_ in their name. By default the plugin stressor will find all functions prefixed with stress_ in their name and exercise these one by one in a round-robin loop, but a specific stressor can be selected using the --plugin-method option. The stressor function takes no parameters and returns 0 for success and non-zero for failure (and will terminate the plugin stressor). Each time a stressor function is executed the bogo-op counter is incremented by one. The following example performs 10000 nop instructions per bogo-op: int stress_example(void) { int i; for (i = 0; i < 10000; i++) { __asm__ __volatile__("nop"); } return 0; /* Success */ } and compile the source into a shared library as, for exam- ple: gcc -fpic -shared -o example.so example.c and run as using: stress-ng --plugin 1 --plugin-so ./example.so --plugin-method function run a specific stressor function, specify the name without the leading stress_ prefix. --plugin-ops N stop after N iterations of the user provided stressor func- tion(s). --plugin-so name specify the shared library containing the user provided stressor function(s). Polling stressor -P N, --poll N start N workers that perform zero timeout polling via the poll(2), ppoll(2), select(2), pselect(2) and sleep(3) calls. This wastes system and user time doing nothing. --poll-fds N specify the number of file descriptors to poll/ppoll/se- lect/pselect on. The maximum number for select/pselect is limited by FD_SETSIZE and the upper maximum is also limited by the maximum number of pipe open descriptors allowed. --poll-ops N stop poll stress workers after N bogo poll operations. --poll-random-us N use a random timeout of N microseconds for ppoll(2) and ps- elect(2) calls instead of the default of 20000 microsec- onds. Power maths functions --powmath N start N workers that exercise various libm power functions with input values 0 to 1 in steps of 0.001; the results are sanity checked to ensure no variation occurs after each round of 10000 computations. --powmath-ops N stop after N power function bogo-operation loops. --powmath-method method specify a power function to exercise. Available power func- tion stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the below power functions methods cpow complex double power function cpowf complex float power function cpowl complex long double power function csqrt complex double square root function (1/2 power) csqrtf complex float square root function (1/2 power) csqrtl complex long double square root function (1/2 power) cbrt double cube root function (1/3 power) cbrtf float cube root function (1/3 power) cbrtl long double cube root function (1/3 power) hypot double Euclidean distance function (hypotenuse) hypotf float Euclidean distance function (hypotenuse) hypotl long double Euclidean distance function (hy- potenuse) pow double power function powf float power function powl long double power function sqrt double square root function (1/2 power) sqrtf float square root function (1/2 power) sqrtl long double square root function (1/2 power) Prctl stressor --prctl N start N workers that exercise the majority of the prctl(2) system call options. Each batch of prctl calls is performed inside a new child process to ensure the limit of prctl is contained inside a new process every time. Some prctl op- tions are architecture specific, however, this stressor will exercise these even if they are not implemented. --prctl-ops N stop prctl workers after N batches of prctl calls L3 cache prefetching stressor --prefetch N start N workers that benchmark prefetch and non-prefetch reads of a L3 cache sized buffer. The buffer is read with loops of 8 x 64 bit reads per iteration. In the prefetch cases, data is prefetched ahead of the current read posi- tion by various sized offsets, from 64 bytes to 8 K to find the best memory read throughput. The stressor reports the non-prefetch read rate and the best prefetched read rate. It also reports the prefetch offset and an estimate of the amount of time between the prefetch issue and the actual memory read operation. These statistics will vary from run- to-run due to system noise and CPU frequency scaling. --prefetch-l3-size N specify the size of the l3 cache --prefetch-method N select the prefetching method. Available methods are: Method Description builtin Use the __builtin_prefetch(3) function for prefetching. This is the default. builtinl0 Use the __builtin_prefetch(3) function for prefetching, with a locality 0 hint. builtinl3 Use the __builtin_prefetch(3) function for prefetching, with a locality 3 hint. dcbt Use the ppc64 dcbt instruction to fetch data into the L1 cache (ppc64 only). dcbtst Use the ppc64 dcbtst instruction to fetch data into the L1 cache (ppc64 only). prefetcht0 Use the x86 prefetcht0 instruction to prefetch data into all levels of the cache hierarchy (x86 only). prefetcht1 Use the x86 prefetcht1 instruction (tempo- ral data with respect to first level cache) to prefetch data into level 2 cache and higher (x86 only). prefetcht2 Use the x86 prefetcht2 instruction (tempo- ral data with respect to second level cache) to prefetch data into level 2 cache and higher (x86 only). prefetchnta Use the x86 prefetchnta instruction (non- temporal data with respect to all cache levels) into a location close to the processor, minimizing cache pollution (x86 only). prfm_pldl1keep Use the aarch64 prfm instruction with pld1keep operation (retained or temporal prefetch, allocated in the cache normally) to prefetch data into level 1 of the cache hierarchy (aarch64 only). prfm_pldl2keep Use the aarch64 prfm instruction with pld1keep operation (retained or temporal prefetch, allocated in the cache normally) to prefetch data into level 2 of the cache hierarchy (aarch64 only). prfm_pldl3keep Use the aarch64 prfm instruction with pld1keep operation (retained or temporal prefetch, allocated in the cache normally) to prefetch data into level 3 of the cache hierarchy (aarch64 only). prfm_pldl1strm Use the aarch64 prfm instruction with pld1strm operation (streaming or non-tempo- ral prefetch, for data that is used only once) to prefetch data into level 1 of the cache hierarchy (aarch64 only). prfm_pldl2strm Use the aarch64 prfm instruction with pld1strm operation (streaming or non-tempo- ral prefetch, for data that is used only once) to prefetch data into level 2 of the cache hierarchy (aarch64 only). prfm_pldl3strm Use the aarch64 prfm instruction with pld1strm operation (streaming or non-tempo- ral prefetch, for data that is used only once) to prefetch data into level 3 of the cache hierarchy (aarch64 only). --prefetch-ops N stop prefetch stressors after N benchmark operations Search for prime numbers using large integers --prime N start N workers that find prime numbers using the GNU Mul- tiple Precision Arithmetic Library for large integers. The GMP mpz_nextprime function is used to find primes and it uses a probabilistic algorithm to identify primes, but there is a extremely small chance that the values found are non-prime. The search becomes computationally more expen- sive over time to find larger and larger primes, hence the bogo-op rate will reduce over time. --prime-method [ factorial | inc | pwr2 | pwr10 ] selects the method of calculating the next value from where to start searching primes and hence how large the primes get. The default is inc, the methods to start searching for primes are described as follows. Method Description factorial start of search based on factorial expansion. This grows rapidly. inc start of search based on increments by 2. This grows very slowly. pwr2 start of search based on powers of 2. Grows rel- atively quickly. pwr10 start of search based on powers of 10. Grows by 1 digit per iteration and grows quickly. --prime-ops N stop after finding N prime numbers. --prime-progress show the number of primes found and length of largest prime found. This is displayed either every 60 seconds or more than 60 seconds if it takes longer to find the next prime. --prime-start N start the prime search from value N. The value may be ex- pressed as an integer value or as a floating point value (e.g. 1e200 to express a very large starting value). Priority inversion stressor --prio-inv N start N workers that exercise mutex lock priority inversion scheduling. Three child process run with low, medium and high FIFO scheduling priorities. The processes with low and high priorities share a mutex lock that both try to lock and unlock, aiming to make the low priority process block the high priority process. Meanwhile the middle pri- ority process will run in priority over the low priority process, causing the high priority process to become un- runnable. --prio-inv-ops N stop after N bogo lock/unlock operations. --prio-inv-type [ inherit | none | protect ] select the mutex lock priority inversion type, described as follows: Type Description inherit The priority of the process owning the mutex lock is run with highest priority of any other process waiting on the lock to avoid priority inversion deadlock. none The priority of the process owning the mutex lock is not affected by its mutex ownership. This may lead to the high priority process to become un- runnable on a single thread system. protect The priority of the process owning the mutex lock is given the priority of the mutex (in this stress test case, the maximum priority) during the lock ownership. --prio-inv-policy [ batch | ext | idle | fifo | other | rr ] select the scheduling policy. "Normal" policies (batch, ext, idle and other) can be selected as an unprivileged user, however "Real Time" policies (fifo and rr) can only be selected with the appropriate privilege. By default "fifo" is selected but it will fall back to "other" for un- privileged users. Privileged CPU instructions stressor --priv-instr N start N workers that exercise various architecture specific privileged instructions that cannot be executed by user- space programs. These instructions will be trapped and processed by SIGSEGV or SIGILL signal handlers. --priv-instr-ops N stop priv-instr stressors after N rounds of executing priv- ileged instructions. /proc stressor --procfs N start N workers that read files from /proc and recursively read files from /proc/self (Linux only). --procfs-ops N stop procfs reading after N bogo read operations. Note, since the number of entries may vary between kernels, this bogo ops metric is probably very misleading. pwrite/pread lseek I/O stressor --pseek N start N workers that exercise pwrite(2) and pread(2) with lseek(2) positioning tests. Each worker has 4 sub- processes that perform repeated pwrite and pread operations using the same shared file descriptor. Two of the processes are started using pthreads (if available), another two processes are started with fork(2). Using pwrite and pread should perform I/O without altering the shared file de- scriptor file offset. The main worker process performs I/O using lseek(2)/write(2) and lseek(2)/read(2) calls that change the file offset; lseeks are sanity checked to see if they are being altered by pwrite and pread calls. --pseek-io-size N specify size of each write/read I/O operation in bytes. Size can be from 1 byte to 1 MB. --pseek-ops N stop after N writes by the main worker process. --pseek-rand normally each sub-process writes to a fix file offset, us- ing this option will randomize the offset on each write/read cycle. Pthread stressor --pthread N start N workers that iteratively creates and terminates multiple pthreads (the default is 1024 pthreads per worker). In each iteration, each newly created pthread waits until the worker has created all the pthreads and then they all terminate together. --pthread-max N create N pthreads per worker. If the product of the number of pthreads by the number of workers is greater than the soft limit of allowed pthreads then the maximum is re-ad- justed down to the maximum allowed. --pthread-ops N stop pthread workers after N bogo pthread create opera- tions. Ptrace stressor --ptrace N start N workers that fork and trace system calls of a child process using ptrace(2). --ptrace-ops N stop ptracer workers after N bogo system calls are traced. Pointer Chasing stressor --ptr-chase N start N workers that chase memory pointers around page sized nodes of pointers. By default each stressor instance allocates 4096 pages of nodes, each node is an array of pointers that are randomly set to point to other node pages. The stressors follow randomly chosen pointers from each node, chasing around the entire node space. This exer- cises pointer fetching, pointer dereferencing and is a cache-read exercising stressor. The nodes are allocated with 50% of pages from the heap and 50% from mmap'd memory. --ptr-chase-ops N stop after N pointer chases --ptr-chase-pages N select number of pages to allocate for the nodes. Pseudo-terminals (pty) stressor --pty N start N workers that repeatedly attempt to open pseudoter- minals and perform various pty ioctl(2) calls upon the ptys before closing them. --pty-max N try to open a maximum of N pseudoterminals, the default is 65536. The allowed range of this setting is 8..65536. --pty-ops N stop pty workers after N pty bogo operations. Qsort stressor -Q, --qsort N start N workers that sort 32 bit integers using qsort(3). --qsort-method [ qsort-libc | qsort-bm ] select either the libc implementation of qsort or the J. L. Bentley and M. D. McIlroy implementation of qsort. The de- fault is the libc implementation. --qsort-ops N stop qsort stress workers after N bogo qsorts. --qsort-size N specify number of 32 bit integers to sort, default is 262144 (256 x 1024). Quota stressor --quota N start N workers that exercise the Q_GETQUOTA, Q_GETFMT, Q_GETINFO, Q_GETSTATS and Q_SYNC quotactl(2) commands on all the available mounted block based file systems. Re- quires CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability to run. --quota-ops N stop quota stress workers after N bogo quotactl operations. Process scheduler stressor --race-sched N start N workers that exercise rapid changing CPU affinity child processes both from the controlling stressor and by the child processes. Child processes are created and termi- nated rapidly with the aim to create race conditions where affinity changing occurs during process run states. --race-sched-method [ all | next | prev | rand | randinc | sync- next | syncprev ] Select the method moving a process to a specific CPU. Available methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the race-sched methods as listed below: next move a process to the next CPU, wrap around to zero when maximum CPU is reached. prev move a process to the previous CPU, wrap around to the maximum CPU when the first CPU is reached. rand move a process to any randomly chosen CPU. randinc move a process to the current CPU + a randomly chosen value 1..4, modulo the number of CPUs. syncnext move synchronously all the race-sched stressor processes to the next CPU every second; this loads just 1 CPU at a time in a round-robin method. syncprev move synchronously all the race-sched stressor processes to the previous CPU every second; this loads just 1 CPU at a time in a round-robin method. --race-sched-ops N stop after N process creation bogo-operations. Radixsort stressor --radixsort N start N workers that sort random 8 byte strings using radixsort(3) --radixsort-method [ radixsort-libc | radixsort-nonlibc ] select either the libc implementation of radixsort or an optimized implementation of radixsort. The default is the libc implementation if it is available. --radixsort-ops N stop radixsort stress workers after N bogo radixsorts. --radixsort-size N specify number of strings to sort, default is 262144 (256 x 1024). Memory filesystem stressor --ramfs N start N workers mounting a memory based file system using ramfs and tmpfs (Linux only). This alternates between mounting and umounting a ramfs or tmpfs file system using the traditional mount(2) and umount(2) system call as well as the newer Linux 5.2 fsopen(2), fsmount(2), fsconfig(2) and move_mount(2) system calls if they are available. The default ram file system size is 2 MB. --ramfs-fill fill ramfs with zero'd data using fallocate(2) if it is available or multiple calls to write(2) if not. --ramfs-ops N stop after N ramfs mount operations. --ramfs-size N set the ramfs size (must be multiples of the page size). Raw device stressor --rawdev N start N workers that read the underlying raw drive device using direct IO reads. The device (with minor number 0) that stores the current working directory is the raw device to be read by the stressor. The read size is exactly the size of the underlying device block size. By default, this stressor will exercise all the of the rawdev methods (see the --rawdev-method option). This is a Linux only stressor and requires root privilege to be able to read the raw de- vice. --rawdev-method method Available rawdev stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the rawdev stress methods as listed below: sweep repeatedly read across the raw device from the 0th block to the end block in steps of the number of blocks on the device / 128 and back to the start again. wiggle repeatedly read across the raw device in 128 evenly steps with each step reading 1024 blocks backwards from each step. ends repeatedly read the first and last 128 start and end blocks of the raw device alternating from start of the device to the end of the device. random repeatedly read 256 random blocks burst repeatedly read 256 sequential blocks starting from a random block on the raw device. --rawdev-ops N stop the rawdev stress workers after N raw device read bogo operations. Random list stressor --randlist N start N workers that creates a list of objects in random- ized memory order and traverses the list setting and read- ing the objects. This is designed to exerise memory and cache thrashing. Normally the objects are allocated on the heap, however for objects of page size or larger there is a 1 in 16 chance of objects being allocated using shared anonymous memory mapping to mix up the address spaces of the allocations to create more TLB thrashing. --randist-compact Allocate all the list objects using one large heap alloca- tion and divide this up for all the list objects. This re- moves the overhead of the heap keeping track of each list object, hence uses less memory. --randlist-items N Allocate N items on the list. By default, 100000 items are allocated. --randlist-ops N stop randlist workers after N list traversals --randlist-size N Allocate each item to be N bytes in size. By default, the size is 64 bytes of data payload plus the list handling pointer overhead. Localhost raw socket stressor --rawsock N start N workers that send and receive packet data using raw sockets on the localhost. Requires CAP_NET_RAW to run. --rawsock-ops N stop rawsock workers after N packets are received. --rawsock-port P start at socket port P. For N rawsock worker processes, ports P to P - 1 are used. Localhost ethernet raw packets stressor --rawpkt N start N workers that sends and receives ethernet packets using raw packets on the localhost via the loopback device. Requires CAP_NET_RAW to run. --rawpkt-ops N stop rawpkt workers after N packets from the sender process are received. --rawpkt-port N start at port P. For N rawpkt worker processes, ports P to (P x 4) - 1 are used. The default starting port is port 14000. --rawpkt-rxring N setup raw packets with RX ring with N number of blocks, this selects TPACKET_V. N must be one of 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16. Localhost raw UDP packet stressor --rawudp N start N workers that send and receive UDP packets using raw sockets on the localhost. Requires CAP_NET_RAW to run. --rawudp-if NAME use network interface NAME. If the interface NAME does not exist, is not up or does not support the domain then the loopback (lo) interface is used as the default. --rawudp-ops N stop rawudp workers after N packets are received. --rawudp-port N start at port P. For N rawudp worker processes, ports P to (P x 4) - 1 are used. The default starting port is port 13000. Random number generator stressor --rdrand N start N workers that read a random number from an on-chip random number generator This uses the rdrand instruction on Intel x86 processors or the darn instruction on PowerPC processors. --rdrand-ops N stop rdrand stress workers after N bogo rdrand operations (1 bogo op = 2048 random bits successfully read). --rdrand-seed use rdseed instead of rdrand (x86 only). Read-ahead stressor --readahead N start N workers that randomly seek and perform 4096 byte read/write I/O operations on a file with readahead(2). The default file size is 64 MB. Readaheads and reads are batched into 16 readaheads and then 16 reads. --readahead-bytes N set the size of readahead file, the default is 1 GB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --readahead-ops N stop readahead stress workers after N bogo read operations. Reboot stressor --reboot N start N workers that exercise the reboot(2) system call. When possible, it will create a process in a PID namespace and perform a reboot power off command that should shutdown the process. Also, the stressor exercises invalid reboot magic values and invalid reboots when there are insuffi- cient privileges that will not actually reboot the system. --reboot-ops N stop the reboot stress workers after N bogo reboot cycles. POSIX regular expressions stressor --regex N start N workers that compile various POSIX regular expres- sions and execute them against a set of text strings. This exercises the regex C library with a range of various sim- ple and complex regex expressions. --regex-ops N stop after N regex compilations. CPU registers stressor --regs N start N workers that shuffle data around the CPU registers exercising register move instructions. Each bogo-op repre- sents 1000 calls of a shuffling function that shuffles the registers 32 times. Only implemented for the GCC compiler since this requires register annotations and optimization level 0 to compile appropriately. --regs-ops N stop regs stressors after N bogo operations. Memory page reordering stressor --remap N start N workers that map 512 pages and re-order these pages using the deprecated system call remap_file_pages(2). Sev- eral page re-orderings are exercised: forward, reverse, random and many pages to 1 page. --remap-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd huge pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --remap-ops N stop after N remapping bogo operations. --remap-pages N specify number of pages to remap, must be a power of 2, de- fault is 512 pages. Renaming file stressor -R N, --rename N start N workers that each create a file and then repeatedly rename it. --rename-ops N stop rename stress workers after N bogo rename operations. Process rescheduling stressor --resched N start N workers that exercise process rescheduling. Each stressor spawns a child process for each of the positive nice levels and iterates over the nice levels from 0 to the lowest priority level (highest nice value). For each of the nice levels 1024 iterations over 3 non-real time scheduling polices SCHED_OTHER, SCHED_BATCH and SCHED_IDLE are set and a sched_yield(2) occurs to force heavy rescheduling activ- ity. When the -v verbose option is used the distribution of the number of yields across the nice levels is printed for the first stressor out of the N stressors. --resched-ops N stop after N rescheduling sched_yield calls. System resources stressor --resources N start N workers that consume various system resources. Each worker will spawn 1024 child processes that iterate 1024 times consuming shared memory, heap, stack, temporary files and various file descriptors (eventfds, memoryfds, user- faultfds, pipes and sockets). --resources-mlock attempt to mlock(2) mmap'd pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --resources-ops N stop after N resource child forks. Writing temporary files in reverse position stressor --revio N start N workers continually writing in reverse position or- der to temporary files. The default mode is to stress test reverse position ordered writes with randomly sized sparse holes between each write. With the --aggressive option en- abled without any --revio-opts options the revio stressor will work through all the --revio-opt options one by one to cover a range of I/O options. --revio-bytes N write N bytes for each revio process, the default is 1 GB. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes us- ing the suffix b, k, m or g. --revio-opts list specify various stress test options as a comma separated list. Options are the same as --hdd-opts but without the iovec option and with a readahead option to force a reada- head action over the entire file once it has been com- pletely written. --revio-ops N stop revio stress workers after N bogo operations. --revio-write-size N specify size of each write in bytes. Size can be from 1 byte to 4 MB. Ring pipes stressor --ring-pipe N start N workers that move data around a ring of pipes using poll to detect when data is ready to copy. By default, 256 pipes are used with two 4096 byte items of data being copied around the ring of pipes. Data is copied using read and write system calls. If the splice system call is avail- able then one can use splice to use more efficient in-ker- nel data passing instead of buffer copying. --ring-pipe-num N specify the number of pipes to use. Ranges from 4 to 262144, default is 256. --ring-pipe-ops N stop after N pipe data transfers. --ring-pipe-size N specify the size of data being copied in bytes. Ranges from 1 to 4096, default is 4096. --ring-pipe-splice enable splice to move data between pipes (only if splice() is available). Rlimit stressor --rlimit N start N workers that exceed resource limits via setting rlimit(2) and trying to exceed these limits, generating SIGXCPU, SIGXFSZ and SIGSEGV signals. --rlimit-ops N stop after N bogo resource limited SIGXCPU and SIGXFSZ sig- nals have been caught. VM reverse-mapping stressor --rmap N start N workers that exercise the VM reverse-mapping. This creates 16 processes per worker that write/read multiple file-backed memory mappings. There are 64 lots of 4 page mappings made onto the file, with each mapping overlapping the previous by 3 pages and at least 1 page of non-mapped memory between each of the mappings. Data is synchronously msync'd to the file 1 in every 256 iterations in a random manner. --rmap-ops N stop after N bogo rmap memory writes/reads. 1 bit rotation stressor --rotate N start N workers that exercise 1 bit rotates left and right of unsigned integer variables. The default will rotate four 8, 16, 32, 64 (and if supported 128) bit values 10000 times in a loop per bogo-op. --rotate-method method specify the method of rotation to use. The `all' method uses all the methods and is the default. Method Description all exercise with all the rotate stressor methods (see below): rol8 8 bit unsigned rotate left by 1 bit ror8 8 bit unsigned rotate right by 1 bit rol16 16 bit unsigned rotate left by 1 bit ror16 16 bit unsigned rotate right by 1 bit rol32 32 bit unsigned rotate left by 1 bit ror32 32 bit unsigned rotate right by 1 bit rol64 64 bit unsigned rotate left by 1 bit ror64 64 bit unsigned rotate right by 1 bit rol128 128 bit unsigned rotate left by 1 bit ror128 128 bit unsigned rotate right by 1 bit --rotate-ops N stop after N bogo rotate operations. Restartable sequences (rseq) stressor (Linux) --rseq N start N workers that exercise restartable sequences via the rseq(2) system call. This loops over a long duration crit- ical section that is likely to be interrupted. A rseq abort handler keeps count of the number of interruptions and a SIGSEGV handler also tracks any failed rseq aborts that can occur if there is a mismatch in a rseq check sig- nature. Linux only. --rseq-ops N stop after N bogo rseq operations. Each bogo rseq operation is equivalent to 10000 iterations over a long duration rseq handled critical section. Real-time clock stressor --rtc N start N workers that exercise the real time clock (RTC) in- terfaces via /dev/rtc and /sys/class/rtc/rtc0. No destruc- tive writes (modifications) are performed on the RTC. This is a Linux only stressor. --rtc-ops N stop after N bogo RTC interface accesses. Fast process rescheduling stressor --schedmix N start N workers that each start child processes that re- peatedly select random a scheduling policy and then exe- cutes a short duration randomly chosen time consuming ac- tivity. This exercises rapid re-scheduling of processes and generates a large amount of scheduling timer interrupts. --schedmix-ops N stop after N scheduling mixed operations. --schedmix-procs N specify the number of chid processes to run for each stres- sor instance, range from 1 to 64, default is 16. Scheduling policy stressor --schedpolicy N start N workers that set the worker to various available scheduling policies out of SCHED_OTHER, SCHED_BATCH, SCHED_IDLE, SCHED_FIFO, SCHED_RR, SCHED_DEADLINE and SCHED_EXT. For the real time scheduling policies a random sched priority is selected between the minimum and maximum scheduling priority settings. --schedpolicy-ops N stop after N bogo scheduling policy changes. --schedpolicy-rand Select scheduling policy randomly so that the new policy is always different to the previous policy. The default is to work through the scheduling policies sequentially. Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) stressor --sctp N start N workers that perform network sctp stress activity using the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). This involves client/server processes performing rapid con- nect, send/receives and disconnects on the local host. --sctp-domain D specify the domain to use, the default is ipv4. Currently ipv4 and ipv6 are supported. --sctp-if NAME use network interface NAME. If the interface NAME does not exist, is not up or does not support the domain then the loopback (lo) interface is used as the default. --sctp-ops N stop sctp workers after N bogo operations. --sctp-port P start at sctp port P. For N sctp worker processes, ports P to (P x 4) - 1 are used for ipv4, ipv6 domains and ports P to P - 1 are used for the unix domain. --sctp-sched [ fc | fcfs | prio | rr | wfq ] specify SCTP scheduler, one of fc (fair capacity), fcfs (first come first served, the default), prio (priority), rr (round-robin) or wfq (weighted fair queueing) File sealing (SEAL) stressor (Linux) --seal N start N workers that exercise the fcntl(2) SEAL commands on a small anonymous file created using memfd_create(2). Af- ter each SEAL command is issued the stressor also sanity checks if the seal operation has sealed the file correctly. (Linux only). --seal-ops N stop after N bogo seal operations. Secure computing stressor --seccomp N start N workers that exercise Secure Computing system call filtering. Each worker creates child processes that write a short message to /dev/null and then exits. 2% of the child processes have a seccomp filter that disallows the write system call and hence it is killed by seccomp with a SIGSYS. Note that this stressor can generate many audit log messages each time the child is killed. Requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN to run. --seccomp-ops N stop seccomp stress workers after N seccomp filter tests. Secret memory stressor (Linux >= 5.11) --secretmem N start N workers that mmap pages using file mapping off a memfd_secret(2) file descriptor. Each stress loop iteration will expand the mappable region by 3 pages using ftruncate and mmap and touches the pages. The pages are then frag- mented by unmapping the middle page and then umapping the first and last pages. This tries to force page fragmenta- tion and also trigger out of memory (OOM) kills of the stressor when the secret memory is exhausted. Note this is a Linux 5.11+ only stressor and the kernel needs to be booted with "secretmem=" option to allocate a secret memory reservation. --secretmem-ops N stop secretmem stress workers after N stress loop itera- tions. IO seek stressor --seek N start N workers that randomly seeks and performs 512 byte read/write I/O operations on a file. The default file size is 16 GB. --seek-ops N stop seek stress workers after N bogo seek operations. --seek-punch punch randomly located 8 K holes into the file to cause more extents to force a more demanding seek stressor, (Linux only). --seek-size N specify the size of the file in bytes. Small file sizes al- low the I/O to occur in the cache, causing greater CPU load. Large file sizes force more I/O operations to drive causing more wait time and more I/O on the drive. One can specify the size in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. POSIX semaphore stressor --sem N start N workers that perform POSIX semaphore wait and post operations. By default, a parent and 4 children are started per worker to provide some contention on the semaphore. This stresses fast semaphore operations and produces rapid context switching. --sem-ops N stop semaphore stress workers after N bogo semaphore opera- tions. --sem-procs N start N child workers per worker to provide contention on the semaphore, the default is 4 and a maximum of 64 are al- lowed. --sem-shared share the semaphore across all sem stressor instances. Nor- mally each semaphore stressor shares a semaphore with its child processes, this option produces more locking con- tention and less throughput by sharing a semaphore across all semaphore stressor processes. System V semaphore stressor --sem-sysv N start N workers that perform System V semaphore wait and post operations. By default, a parent and 4 children are started per worker to provide some contention on the sema- phore. This stresses fast semaphore operations and produces rapid context switching. --sem-sysv-ops N stop semaphore stress workers after N bogo System V sema- phore operations. --sem-sysv-procs N start N child processes per worker to provide contention on the System V semaphore, the default is 4 and a maximum of 64 are allowed. --sem-sysv-setall sets the semval values for all the semaphores in the child's semaphore set. This depends on the semctl SETALL op being defined and GETALL succeeding and is an opt-in op- tion as it will affect the semaphore being exercised. Sendfile stressor --sendfile N start N workers that send an empty file to /dev/null using the sendfile(2) call. This operation spends nearly all the time in the kernel. The default sendfile size is 4 MB. The sendfile options are for Linux only. --sendfile-ops N stop sendfile workers after N sendfile bogo operations. --sendfile-size S specify the size to be copied with each sendfile call. The default size is 4 MB. One can specify the size in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. Sessions stressor --session N start N workers that create child and grandchild processes that set and get their session ids. 25% of the grandchild processes are not waited for by the child to create or- phaned sessions that need to be reaped by init. --session-ops N stop session workers after N child processes are spawned and reaped. Setting data in the Kernel stressor --set N start N workers that call system calls that try to set data in the kernel, currently these are: setgid(2), sethost- name(2), setpgid(2), setpgrp(2), setuid(2), setgroups(2), setreuid(2), setregid(2), setresuid(2), setresgid(2) and setrlimit(2). Some of these system calls are OS specific. --set-ops N stop set workers after N bogo set operations. Shellsort stressor --shellsort N start N workers that sort 32 bit integers using shell- sort(3). --shellsort-ops N stop shellsort stress workers after N bogo shellsorts. --shellsort-size N specify number of 32 bit integers to sort, default is 262144 (256 x 1024). POSIX shared memory stressor --shm N start N workers that open and allocate shared memory ob- jects using the POSIX shared memory interfaces. By de- fault, the test will repeatedly create and destroy 32 shared memory objects, each of which is 8 MB in size. --shm-bytes N specify the size of the POSIX shared memory objects to be created. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes us- ing the suffix b, k, m or g. --shm-mlock attempt to mlock(2) shared memory objects into memory caus- ing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --shm-objs N specify the number of shared memory objects to be created. --shm-ops N stop after N POSIX shared memory create and destroy bogo operations are complete. System V shared memory stressor --shm-sysv N start N workers that allocate shared memory using the Sys- tem V shared memory interface. By default, the test will repeatedly create and destroy 8 shared memory segments, each of which is 8 MB in size. --shm-sysv-bytes N specify the size of the shared memory segment to be cre- ated. One can specify the size as % of total available mem- ory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --shm-sysv-mlock attempt to mlock(2) shared memory segment into memory caus- ing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --shm-sysv-ops N stop after N shared memory create and destroy bogo opera- tions are complete. --shm-sysv-segs N specify the number of shared memory segments to be created. The default is 8 segments. SIGABRT stressor --sigabrt N start N workers that create children that are killed by SIGABRT signals or by calling abort(3). --sigabrt-ops N stop the sigabrt workers after N SIGABRT signals are suc- cessfully handled. SIGBUS stressor --sigbus N start N workers that rapidly create and catch bus errors generated via misaligned access and accessing a file backed memory mapping that does not have file storage to back the page being accessed. --sigbus-ops N stop sigbus stress workers after N bogo bus errors. SIGCHLD stressor --sigchld N start N workers that create children to generate SIGCHLD signals. This exercises children that exit (CLD_EXITED), get killed (CLD_KILLED), get stopped (CLD_STOPPED) or con- tinued (CLD_CONTINUED). --sigchld-ops N stop the sigchld workers after N SIGCHLD signals are suc- cessfully handled. SIGFD stressor (Linux) --sigfd N start N workers that generate SIGRT signals and are handled by reads by a child process using a file descriptor set up using signalfd(2). (Linux only). This will generate a heavy context switch load when all CPUs are fully loaded. --sigfd-ops stop sigfd workers after N bogo SIGUSR1 signals are sent. SIGFPE stressor --sigfpe N start N workers that rapidly cause division by zero SIGFPE faults. --sigfpe-ops N stop sigfpe stress workers after N bogo SIGFPE faults. SIGHUP stressor --sighup N start N workers that generate SIGHUP signals using raise(2) and by killing a group leader process with a child process indirectly receiving SIGHUP when it loses the group leader. --sighup-ops N stop sighup stressor workers after N SIGHUP signals SIGILL stressor --sigill N start N workers that execute illegal instructions to gener- ate SIGILL signals. --sigill-ops N stop sigill stressor workers after N SIGILL signals SIGIO stressor --sigio N start N workers that read data from a child process via a pipe and generate SIGIO signals. This exercises asynchro- nous I/O via SIGIO. --sigio-ops N stop sigio stress workers after handling N SIGIO signals. System signals stressor --signal N start N workers that exercise the signal system call three different signal handlers, SIG_IGN (ignore), a SIGCHLD han- dler and SIG_DFL (default action). For the SIGCHLD han- dler, the stressor sends itself a SIGCHLD signal and checks if it has been handled. For other handlers, the stressor checks that the SIGCHLD handler has not been called. This stress test calls the signal system call directly when pos- sible and will try to avoid the C library attempt to re- place signal with the more modern sigaction system call. --signal-ops N stop signal stress workers after N rounds of signal handler setting. Nested signal handling stressor --signest N start N workers that exercise nested signal handling. A signal is raised and inside the signal handler a different signal is raised, working through a list of signals to ex- ercise. An alternative signal stack is used that is large enough to handle all the nested signal calls. The -v op- tion will log the approximate size of the stack required and the average stack size per nested call. --signest-ops N stop after handling N nested signals. Pending signals stressor --sigpending N start N workers that check if SIGUSR1 signals are pending. This stressor masks SIGUSR1, generates a SIGUSR1 signal and uses sigpending(2) to see if the signal is pending. Then it unmasks the signal and checks if the signal is no longer pending. --sigpending-ops N stop sigpending stress workers after N bogo sigpending pending/unpending checks. SIGPIPE stressor --sigpipe N start N workers that repeatedly spawn off child process that exits before a parent can complete a pipe write, caus- ing a SIGPIPE signal. The child process is either spawned using clone(2) if it is available or use the slower fork(2) instead. --sigpipe-ops N stop N workers after N SIGPIPE signals have been caught and handled. Signal queueing stressor --sigq N start N workers that rapidly send SIGUSR1 signals using sigqueue(3) to child processes that wait for the signal via sigwaitinfo(2). --sigq-ops N stop sigq stress workers after N bogo signal send opera- tions. Real-time signals stressor --sigrt N start N workers that each create child processes to handle SIGRTMIN to SIGRMAX real time signals. The parent sends each child process a RT signal via siqueue(2) and the child process waits for this via sigwaitinfo(2). When the child receives the signal it then sends a RT signal to one of the other child processes also via sigqueue(2). --sigrt-ops N stop sigrt stress workers after N bogo sigqueue signal send operations. SIGSEGV stressor --sigsegv N start N workers that rapidly create and catch segmentation faults generated via illegal memory access, illegal vdso system calls, illegal port reads, illegal interrupts or ac- cess to x86 time stamp counter. --sigsegv-ops N stop sigsegv stress workers after N bogo segmentation faults. Waiting for process signals stressor --sigsuspend N start N workers that each spawn off 4 child processes that wait for a SIGUSR1 signal from the parent using sigsus- pend(2). The parent sends SIGUSR1 signals to each child in rapid succession. Each sigsuspend wakeup is counted as one bogo operation. --sigsuspend-ops N stop sigsuspend stress workers after N bogo sigsuspend wakeups. SIGTRAP stressor --sigtrap N start N workers that exercise the SIGTRAP signal. For sys- tems that support SIGTRAP, the signal is generated using raise(SIGTRAP). Only x86 Linux systems the SIGTRAP is also generated by an int 3 instruction. --sigtrap-ops N stop sigtrap stress workers after N SIGTRAP signals have been handled. SIGURG stressor --sigurg N start workers that exercise the SIGURG signal by sending out-of-band data over a TCP/IP IPv4 socket stream. --sigurg-ops N stop sigurg stressor workers after N SIGURG signals have been handled. SIGVTARLM stressor --sigvtalrm N start N workers that exercise the SIGVTALRM signal using an ITIMER_VIRTUAL itimer and a busy loop that consumes CPU time calling getitimer for the ITIMER_VIRTUAL timer. --sigvtalrm-ops N stop sigvtalrm stress workers after N SIGVTALRM signals have been handled. SIGXCPU stressor --sigxcpu N start N workers that exercise the SIGXCPU stressor. A busy loop generates SIGXCPU signals by setting a 0 second run time limit followed by a sched_yield(2) call. --sigxcpu-ops N stop sigsxcpu stress workers after N bogo SIGXCPU signal attempts. SIGXFSZ stressor --sigxfsz N start N workers that exercise the SIGXFSZ stressor. A ran- dom 32 bit file size limit is set and data is written out- side this size limit to generate a SIGXFSZ signal. --sigxfsz-ops N stop sigsxfsz stress workers after N bogo SIGXFSZ signal attempts. Random memory and processor cache line stressor via a skiplist --skiplist N start N workers that store and then search for integers us- ing a skiplist. By default, 65536 integers are added and searched. This is a useful method to exercise random ac- cess of memory and processor cache. --skiplist-ops N stop the skiplist worker after N skiplist store and search cycles are completed. --skiplist-size N specify the size (number of integers) to store and search in the skiplist. Size can be from 1 K to 4 M. Time interrupts and context switches stressor --sleep N start N workers that spawn off multiple threads that each perform multiple sleeps of ranges 1us to 0.1s. This cre- ates multiple context switches and timer interrupts. --sleep-max P start P threads per worker. The default is 1024, the maxi- mum allowed is 30000. --sleep-ops N stop after N sleep bogo operations. System management interrupts (SMI) stressor --smi N start N workers that attempt to generate system management interrupts (SMIs) into the x86 ring -2 system management mode (SMM) by exercising the advanced power management (APM) port 0xb2. This requires the --pathological option and root privilege and is only implemented on x86 Linux platforms. This probably does not work in a virtualized en- vironment. The stressor will attempt to determine the time stolen by SMIs with some naive benchmarking. --smi-ops N stop after N attempts to trigger the SMI. Network socket stressor -S N, --sock N start N workers that perform various socket stress activ- ity. This involves a pair of client/server processes per- forming rapid connect, send and receives and disconnects on the local host. --sock-domain D specify the domain to use, the default is ipv4. Currently ipv4, ipv6 and unix are supported. --sock-if NAME use network interface NAME. If the interface NAME does not exist, is not up or does not support the domain then the loopback (lo) interface is used as the default. --sock-msgs N send N messages per connect, send/receive, disconnect iter- ation. The default is 1000 messages. If N is too small then the rate is throttled back by the overhead of socket con- nect and disconnect (on Linux, one needs to increase /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_max to allow more con- nections). --sock-nodelay This disables the TCP Nagle algorithm, so data segments are always sent as soon as possible. This stops data from be- ing buffered before being transmitted, hence resulting in poorer network utilisation and more context switches be- tween the sender and receiver. --sock-ops N stop socket stress workers after N bogo operations. --sock-opts [ random | send | sendmsg | sendmmsg ] by default, messages are sent using send(2). This option allows one to specify the sending method using send(2), sendmsg(2), sendmmsg(2) or a random selection of one of these 3 on each iteration. Note that sendmmsg is only available for Linux systems that support this system call. --sock-port P start at socket port P. For N socket worker processes, ports P to P - 1 are used. --sock-protocol P Use the specified protocol P, default is tcp. Options are tcp and mptcp (if supported by the operating system). --sock-type [ stream | seqpacket ] specify the socket type to use. The default type is stream. seqpacket currently only works for the unix socket domain. --sock-zerocopy enable zerocopy for send and recv calls if the MSG_ZEROCOPY is supported. Socket abusing stressor --sockabuse N start N workers that abuse a socket file descriptor with various file based system that don't normally act on sock- ets. The kernel should handle these illegal and unexpected calls gracefully. --sockabuse-ops N stop after N iterations of the socket abusing stressor loop. --sockabuse-port P start at socket port P. For N sockabuse worker processes, ports P to P - 1 are used. Socket diagnostic stressor (Linux) --sockdiag N start N workers that exercise the Linux sock_diag netlink socket diagnostics (Linux only). This currently requests diagnostics using UDIAG_SHOW_NAME, UDIAG_SHOW_VFS, UDIAG_SHOW_PEER, UDIAG_SHOW_ICONS, UDIAG_SHOW_RQLEN and UDIAG_SHOW_MEMINFO for the AF_UNIX family of socket connec- tions. --sockdiag-ops N stop after receiving N sock_diag diagnostic messages. Socket file descriptor stressor --sockfd N start N workers that pass file descriptors over a UNIX do- main socket using the CMSG(3) ancillary data mechanism. For each worker, pair of client/server processes are created, the server opens as many file descriptors on /dev/null as possible and passing these over the socket to a client that reads these from the CMSG data and immediately closes the files. --sockfd-ops N stop sockfd stress workers after N bogo operations. --sockfd-port P start at socket port P. For N socket worker processes, ports P to P - 1 are used. --sockfd-reuse reuse the file descriptor by passing it back from the re- ceiver to the sender and re-sending it again rather than opening /dev/null each time. Opening network socket stressor --sockmany N start N workers that use a client process to attempt to open as many as 100000 TCP/IP socket connections to a server on port 10000. --sockmany-if NAME use network interface NAME. If the interface NAME does not exist, is not up or does not support the domain then the loopback (lo) interface is used as the default. --sockmany-ops N stop after N connections. --sockmany-port P start at socket port P. For N sockmany worker processes, ports P to P - 1 are used. Socket I/O stressor --sockpair N start N workers that perform socket pair I/O read/writes. This involves a pair of client/server processes performing randomly sized socket I/O operations. --sockpair-ops N stop socket pair stress workers after N bogo operations. Softlockup stressor --softlockup N start N workers that flip between with the "real-time" SCHED_FIO and SCHED_RR scheduling policies at the highest priority to force softlockups. This can only be run with CAP_SYS_NICE capability and for best results the number of stressors should be at least the number of online CPUs. Once running, this is practically impossible to stop and it will force softlockup issues and may trigger watchdog time- out reboots. --softlockup-ops N stop softlockup stress workers after N bogo scheduler pol- icy changes. Sparse matrix stressor --sparsematrix N start N workers that exercise 3 different sparse matrix im- plementations based on hashing, Judy array (for 64 bit sys- tems), 2-d circular linked-lists, memory mapped 2-d matrix (non-sparse), quick hashing (on preallocated nodes) and red-black tree. The sparse matrix is populated with val- ues, random values potentially non-existing values are read, known existing values are read and known existing values are marked as zero. This default 500 x 500 sparse matrix is used and 5000 items are put into the sparse ma- trix making it 2% utilized. --sparsematrix-items N populate the sparse matrix with N items. If N is greater than the number of elements in the sparse matrix than N will be capped to create at 100% full sparse matrix. --sparsematrix-method [ all | hash | hashjudy | judy | list | mmap | qhash | rb ] specify the type of sparse matrix implementation to use. The `all' method uses all the methods and is the default. Method Description all exercise with all the sparsematrix stressor meth- ods (see below): hash use a hash table and allocate nodes on the heap for each unique value at a (x, y) matrix posi- tion. hashjudy use a hash table for x coordinates and a Judy ar- ray for y coordinates for values at a (x, y) ma- trix position. judy use a Judy array with a unique 1-to-1 mapping of (x, y) matrix position into the array. list use a circular linked-list for sparse y positions each with circular linked-lists for sparse x po- sitions for the (x, y) matrix coordinates. mmap use a non-sparse mmap the entire 2-d matrix space. Only (x, y) matrix positions that are ref- erenced will get physically mapped. Note that large sparse matrices cannot be mmap'd due to lack of virtual address limitations, and too many referenced pages can trigger the out of memory killer on Linux. qhash use a hash table with pre-allocated nodes for each unique value. This is a quick hash table im- plementation, nodes are not allocated each time with calloc and are allocated from a pre-allo- cated pool leading to quicker hash table perfor- mance than the hash method. rb use a red-black balanced tree using one tree node for each unique value at a (x, y) matrix posi- tion. splay use a splay tree using one tree node for each unique value at a (x, y) matrix position. --sparsematrix-ops N stop after N sparsematrix test iterations. --sparsematrix-size N use a N x N sized sparse matrix POSIX process spawn (posix_spawn) stressor (Linux) --spawn N start N workers continually spawn children using posix_spawn(3) that exec stress-ng and then exit almost im- mediately. Currently Linux only. --spawn-ops N stop spawn stress workers after N bogo spawns. Spinmem stressor --spinmem N start N workers that use a shared memory page to keep two processes synchronized using busy spin loops. One process is a writer that increments a value in memory slot 0 and spin waits for the data to appear in memory slot 1. The other process spin waits for the data to change in slot 0 and copies the changed value into memory slot 1. The stressor benchmarks the time for the transactions to occur between both processes. Note that the optimal number of stressors is half the number of online CPUs in a system. By default 32 bit write/reads are used. --spinmem-affinity move spinmem stressor processes to randomly selected CPUs every million spinmem transactions. --spinmem-method [ 8bit | 16bit | 32bit | 64bit | 128bit ] select the size of the memory write/reads, the default is 32 bit. 128 bit read/writes may not be supported by some toolchains. --spinmem-numa assign shared memory page to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --spinmem-ops N stop after N spinmem bogo operations. A bogo operation is 1000 transactions betewen the two spinmem processes. --spinmem-yield force scheduling yields after each spinmem read/write oper- ation Splice stressor (Linux) --splice N move data from /dev/zero to /dev/null through a pipe with- out any copying between kernel address space and user ad- dress space using splice(2). This is only available for Linux. --splice-bytes N transfer N bytes per splice call, the default is 64 K. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --splice-ops N stop after N bogo splice operations. Stack stressor --stack N start N workers that rapidly cause and catch stack over- flows by use of large recursive stack allocations. Much like the brk stressor, this can eat up pages rapidly and may trigger the kernel OOM killer on the process, however, the killed stressor is respawned again by a monitoring par- ent process. --stack-fill the default action is to touch the lowest page on each stack allocation. This option touches all the pages by filling the new stack allocation with zeros which forces physical pages to be allocated and hence is more aggres- sive. --stack-mlock attempt to mlock(2) stack pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --stack-ops N stop stack stress workers after N bogo stack overflows. --stack-pageout force stack pages out to swap (available when madvise(2) supports MADV_PAGEOUT). --stack-unmap unmap a single page in the middle of a large buffer allo- cated on the stack on each stack allocation. This forces the stack mapping into multiple separate allocation map- pings. Dirty page and stack exception stressor --stackmmap N start N workers that use a 2 MB stack that is memory mapped onto a temporary file. A recursive function works down the stack and flushes dirty stack pages back to the memory mapped file using msync(2) until the end of the stack is reached (stack overflow). This exercises dirty page and stack exception handling. --stackmmap-ops N stop workers after N stack overflows have occurred. Statmount and listmount system call stressor --statmount N start N workers that find mounts on / via listmount and get mount information on the mount IDs using statmount. (Linux only). --statmount-ops N stop workers after iterating on mounts N times. Libc string functions stressor --str N start N workers that exercise various libc string functions on random strings. --str-method strfunc select a specific libc string function to stress. Available string functions to stress are: all, index, rindex, str- casecmp, strcat, strchr, strcoll, strcmp, strcpy, strlen, strncasecmp, strncat, strncmp, strrchr and strxfrm. See string(3) for more information on these string functions. The `all' method is the default and will exercise all the string methods. --str-ops N stop after N bogo string operations. STREAM memory stressor --stream N start N workers exercising a memory bandwidth stressor very loosely based on the STREAM "Sustainable Memory Bandwidth in High Performance Computers" benchmarking tool by John D. McCalpin, Ph.D. This stressor allocates 3 buffers that are at the size of the CPU L3 cache and continually performs rounds of following computations on large arrays of double precision floating point numbers: Operation Description copy c[i] = a[i] scale b[i] = scalar x c[i] add c[i] = a[i] + b[i] triad a[i] = b[i] + (c[i] x scalar) Since this is loosely based on a variant of the STREAM benchmark code, DO NOT submit results based on this as it is intended to in stress-ng just to stress memory and com- pute and NOT intended for STREAM accurate tuned or non- tuned benchmarking whatsoever. Use the official STREAM benchmarking tool if you desire accurate and standardised STREAM benchmarks. The stressor calculates the memory read rate, memory write rate and floating point operations rate. These will differ from the maximum theoretical read/write/compute rates be- cause of loop overheads and the use of volatile pointers to ensure the compiler does not optimize out stores. --stream-index N specify number of stream indices used to index into the data arrays a, b and c. This adds indirection into the data lookup by using randomly shuffled indexing into the three data arrays. Level 0 (no indexing) is the default, and 3 is where all 3 arrays are indexed via 3 different randomly shuffled indexes. The higher the index setting the more impact this has on L1, L2 and L3 caching and hence forces higher memory read/write latencies. --stream-l3-size N Specify the CPU Level 3 cache size in bytes. One can spec- ify the size in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. If the L3 cache size is not provided, then stress-ng will attempt to determine the cache size, and failing this, will default the size to 4 MB. --stream-mlock attempt to mlock(2) the stream buffers into memory to pre- vent them from being swapped out. --stream-madvise [ collapse | hugepage | nohugepage | normal ] Specify the madvise(2) options used on the memory mapped buffer used in the stream stressor. Non-linux systems will only have the `normal' madvise advice. The default is `nor- mal'. --stream-ops N stop after N stream bogo operations, where a bogo operation is one round of copy, scale, add and triad operations. --stream-prefetch compilers such as gcc have optimization options to insert prefetching into memory fetch loops that may improve read performance. This option enables this optimization, how- ever, it may lead to degraded performance if the compiler does not insert the prefetching in the correct places. Best to enable this for the default --stream-index 0 set- ting. Swap partitions stressor (Linux) --swap N start N workers that add and remove small randomly sizes swap partitions (Linux only). Note that if too many swap partitions are added then the stressors may exit with exit code 3 (not enough resources). Requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN to run. --swap-ops N stop the swap workers after N swapon/swapoff iterations. --swap-self attempt to swap out pages of the stressor. Context switching between mutually tied processes stressor -s N, --switch N start N workers that force context switching between two mutually blocking/unblocking tied processes. By default message passing over a pipe is used, but different methods are available. --switch-freq F run the context switching at the frequency of F context switches per second. Note that the specified switch rate may not be achieved because of CPU speed and memory band- width limitations. --switch-method [ mq | pipe | sem-sysv ] select the preferred context switch block/run synchroniza- tion method, these are as follows: Method Description mq use posix message queue with a 1 item size. Mes- sages are passed between a sender and receiver process. pipe single character messages are passed down a sin- gle character sized pipe between a sender and re- ceiver process. sem-sysv a SYSV semaphore is used to block/run two processes. --switch-ops N stop context switching workers after N bogo operations. Symlink stressor --symlink N start N workers creating and removing symbolic links. --symlink-ops N stop symlink stress workers after N bogo operations. --symlink-sync sync dirty data and metadata to disk. Partial file syncing (sync_file_range) stressor --sync-file N start N workers that perform a range of data syncs across a file using sync_file_range(2). Three mixes of syncs are performed, from start to the end of the file, from end of the file to the start, and a random mix. A random selection of valid sync types are used, covering the SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_BEFORE, SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE and SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WAIT_AFTER flag bits. --sync-file-bytes N specify the size of the file to be sync'd. One can specify the size as % of free space on the file system in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --sync-file-ops N stop sync-file workers after N bogo sync operations. CPU synchronized loads stressor --syncload N start N workers that produce sporadic short lived loads synchronized across N stressor processes. By default re- peated cycles of 125ms busy load followed by 62.5ms sleep occur across all the workers in step to create bursts of load to exercise C state transitions and CPU frequency scaling. The busy load and sleeps have +-10% jitter added to try exercising scheduling patterns. --syncload-msbusy M specify the busy load duration in milliseconds. --syncload-mssleep M specify the sleep duration in milliseconds. --syncload-ops N stop syncload workers after N load/sleep cycles. System calls bad address and fault handling stressor --sysbadaddr N start N workers that pass bad addresses to system calls to exercise bad address and fault handling. The addresses used are null pointers, read only pages, write only pages, un- mapped addresses, text only pages, unaligned addresses and top of memory addresses. --sysbadaddr-ops N stop the sysbadaddr stressors after N bogo system calls. System calls stressor --syscall N start N workers that exercise a range of available system calls. System calls that fail due to lack of capabilities or errors are ignored. The stressor will try to maximize the rate of system calls being executed based the entire time taken to setup, run and cleanup after each system call. --syscall-method method select the choice of system calls to executed based on the fastest test duration times. Note that this includes the time to setup, execute the system call and cleanup after- wards. The available methods are as follows: Method Description all select all the available system calls fast10 select the fastest 10% system call tests fast25 select the fastest 25% system call tests fast50 select the fastest 50% system call tests fast75 select the fastest 75% system call tests fast90 select the fastest 90% system call tests geomean1 select tests that are less or equal to the geo- metric mean of all the test times geomean1 select tests that are less or equal to 2 x the geometric mean of all the test times geomean1 select tests that are less or equal to 3 x the geometric mean of all the test times --syscall-ops N stop after N system calls --sycsall-top N report the fastest top N system calls. Setting N to zero will report all the system calls that could be exercised. System information stressor --sysinfo N start N workers that continually read system and process specific information. This reads the process user and sys- tem times using the times(2) system call. For Linux sys- tems, it also reads overall system statistics using the sysinfo(2) system call and also the file system statistics for all mounted file systems using statfs(2). --sysinfo-ops N stop the sysinfo workers after N bogo operations. System calls with invalid arguments stressor (Linux) --sysinval N start N workers that exercise system calls in random order with permutations of invalid arguments to force kernel er- ror handling checks. The stress test autodetects system calls that cause processes to crash or exit prematurely and will blocklist these after several repeated breakages. Sys- tem call arguments that cause system calls to work success- fully are also detected an blocklisted too. Linux only. --sysinval-ops N stop sysinval workers after N system call attempts. /sys stressor (Linux) --sysfs N start N workers that recursively read files from /sys (Linux only). This may cause specific kernel drivers to emit messages into the kernel log. --sysfs-ops N stop sysfs reading after N bogo read operations. Note, since the number of entries may vary between kernels, this bogo ops metric is probably very misleading. Tee stressor (Linux) --tee N move data from a writer process to a reader process through pipes and to /dev/null without any copying between kernel address space and user address space using tee(2). This is only available for Linux. --tee-ops N stop after N bogo tee operations. Timer event stressor (Linux) -T N, --timer N start N workers creating timer events at a default rate of 1 MHz (Linux only); this can create a many thousands of timer clock interrupts. Each timer event is caught by a signal handler and counted as a bogo timer op. --timer-freq F run timers at F Hz; range from 1 to 1000000000 Hz (Linux only). By selecting an appropriate frequency stress-ng can generate hundreds of thousands of interrupts per second. Note: it is also worth using --timer-slack 0 for high fre- quencies to stop the kernel from coalescing timer events. --timer-ops N stop timer stress workers after N bogo timer events (Linux only). --timer-rand select a timer frequency based around the timer frequency +-12.5% random jitter. This tries to force more variability in the timer interval to make the scheduling less pre- dictable. Timerfd stressor (Linux) --timerfd N start N workers creating timerfd events at a default rate of 1 MHz (Linux only); this can create a many thousands of timer clock events. Timer events are waited for on the timer file descriptor using select(2) and then read and counted as a bogo timerfd op. --timerfs-fds N try to use a maximum of N timerfd file descriptors per stressor. --timerfd-freq F run timers at F Hz; range from 1 to 1000000000 Hz (Linux only). By selecting an appropriate frequency stress-ng can generate hundreds of thousands of interrupts per second. --timerfd-ops N stop timerfd stress workers after N bogo timerfd events (Linux only). --timerfd-rand select a timerfd frequency based around the timer frequency +-12.5% random jitter. This tries to force more variability in the timer interval to make the scheduling less pre- dictable. Timer Mix stressor --timermix N start N workers creating timer and itimer signals at a high rate, this can create a many thousands of timer clock in- terrupts per second. Each signal that gets handled is counted as a bogo-operation. For timers, the following clocks types (where available) are used: CLOCK_REALTIME, CLOCK_MONOTONIC, CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID, CLOCK_BOOTTIME and CLOCK_TAI. For itimers, the following interval timer types are used: ITIMER_REAL, ITIMER_VIRTUAL and ITIMER_PROF. Some systems may support none or a subset of these timer or itimer types. The freqeuency of the itimers is auto-adjusted to try and maximize the timer interrupt rate. --timermix-ops N stop after N signals from timers and itimers. Time warp stressor --time-warp N start N workers that read the system time and where appro- priate for monotonic clocks perform a check for reverse time warping. At the end of the run there are time wrap- around checks. This stressor exercises clock_gettime(2) on all available clocks, gettimeofday(2), time(2) and getrusage(2) to check for unexpected time behaviour. Note that only some clocks are reliably monotonic. --time-warp-ops N stop after N rounds of checking all the available clocks and time fetching system calls. Translation lookaside buffer shootdowns stressor --tlb-shootdown N start N workers that force Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) shootdowns. This is achieved by creating up to 16 child processes that all share a region of memory and these processes are shared amongst the available CPUs. The processes adjust the page mapping settings causing TLBs to be force flushed on the other processors, causing the TLB shootdowns. --tlb-shootdown-ops N stop after N bogo TLB shootdown operations are completed. Tmpfs stressor --tmpfs N start N workers that create a temporary file on an avail- able tmpfs file system and perform various file based mmap operations upon it. --tmpfs-mmap-async enable file based memory mapping and use asynchronous msync'ing on each page, see --tmpfs-mmap-file. --tmpfs-mmap-file enable tmpfs file based memory mapping and by default use synchronous msync'ing on each page. --tmpfs-ops N stop tmpfs stressors after N bogo mmap operations. Touching files stressor --touch N touch files by using open(2) or creat(2) and then closing and unlinking them. The filename contains the bogo-op num- ber and is incremented on each touch operation, hence this fills the dentry cache. Note that the user time and system time may be very low as most of the run time is waiting for file I/O and this produces very large bogo-op rates for the very low CPU time used. --touch-method [ random | open | creat ] select the method the file is created, either randomly us- ing open(2) or create(2), just using open(2) with the O_CREAT open flag, or with creat(2). --touch-ops N stop the touch workers after N file touches. --touch-opts [ all | direct | dsync | excl | noatime | sync ] specify various file open options as a comma separated list. Options are as follows: Option Description all use all the open options, namely direct, dsync, excl, noatime and sync direct try to minimize cache effects of the I/O to and from this file, using the O_DIRECT open flag. dsync ensure output has been transferred to underlying hardware and file metadata has been updated using the O_DSYNC open flag. excl fail if file already exists (it should not). noatime do not update the file last access time if the file is read. sync ensure output has been transferred to underlying hardware using the O_SYNC open flag. Tree data structures stressor --tree N start N workers that exercise tree data structures. The de- fault is to add, find and remove 250000 64 bit integers into AVL (avl), Red-Black (rb), Splay (splay), btree and binary trees. The intention of this stressor is to exer- cise memory and cache with the various tree operations. --tree-method [ all | avl | binary | btree | rb | splay ] specify the tree to be used. By default, all the trees are used (the `all' option). --tree-ops N stop tree stressors after N bogo ops. A bogo op covers the addition, finding and removing all the items into the tree(s). --tree-size N specify the size of the tree, where N is the number of 64 bit integers to be added into the tree. Trigonometric functions stressor --trig N start N workers that exercise sin, cos, sincos (where available) and tan libm trigonometric functions using float, double and long double floating point variants. Each function is exercised 10000 times per bogo-operation. --trig-method function specify a trigonometric stress function. By default, all the functions are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one function to be used if required. Avail- able options are as follows: Method Description all iterate through all of the following trigonometric functions cos cosine (double precision) cosf cosine (float precision) cosl cosine (long double precision) sin sine (double precision) sinf sine (float precision) sinl sine (long double precision) sincos sine and cosine (double precision) sincosf sine and cosine (float precision) sincosl sine and cosine (long double precision) tan tangent (double precision) tanf tangent (float precision) tanl tangent (long double precision) --trig-ops N stop after N bogo-operations. Time stamp counter (TSC) stressor --tsc N start N workers that read the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) 256 times per loop iteration (bogo operation). This exercises the tsc instruction for x86, the mftb instruction for ppc64, the rdcycle instruction for RISC-V, the tick in- struction on SPARC and the rdtime.d instruction for Loong64. --tsc-lfence add lfence after each tsc read to force serialization (x86 only). --tsc-ops N stop the tsc workers after N bogo operations are completed. --tsc-rdtscp use the rdtscp instruction instead of rdtsc (x86 only). This also disables the --tsc-lfence option. Binary tree stressor --tsearch N start N workers that insert, search and delete 32 bit inte- gers on a binary tree using tsearch(3), tfind(3) and tdelete(3). By default, there are 65536 randomized integers used in the tree. This is a useful method to exercise ran- dom access of memory and processor cache. --tsearch-ops N stop the tsearch workers after N bogo tree operations are completed. --tsearch-size N specify the size (number of 32 bit integers) in the array to tsearch. Size can be from 1 K to 4 M. Network tunnel stressor --tun N start N workers that create a network tunnel device and sends and receives packets over the tunnel using UDP and then destroys it. A new random 192.168.*.* IPv4 address is used each time a tunnel is created. --tun-ops N stop after N iterations of creating/sending/receiving/de- stroying a tunnel. --tun-tap use network tap device using level 2 frames (bridging) rather than a tun device for level 3 raw packets (tun- nelling). UDP network stressor --udp N start N workers that transmit data using UDP. This involves a pair of client/server processes performing rapid connect, send and receives and disconnects on the local host. --udp-domain D specify the domain to use, the default is ipv4. Currently ipv4 and ipv6 are supported. --udp-gro enable UDP-GRO (Generic Receive Offload) if supported. --udp-if NAME use network interface NAME. If the interface NAME does not exist, is not up or does not support the domain then the loopback (lo) interface is used as the default. --udp-lite use the UDP-Lite (RFC 3828) protocol (only for ipv4 and ipv6 domains). --udp-ops N stop udp stress workers after N bogo operations. --udp-port P start at port P. For N udp worker processes, ports P to P - 1 are used. By default, ports 7000 upwards are used. UDP flooding stressor --udp-flood N start N workers that attempt to flood the host with UDP packets to random ports. The IP address of the packets are currently not spoofed. This is only available on systems that support AF_PACKET. --udp-flood-domain D specify the domain to use, the default is ipv4. Currently ipv4 and ipv6 are supported. --udp-flood-if NAME use network interface NAME. If the interface NAME does not exist, is not up or does not support the domain then the loopback (lo) interface is used as the default. --udp-flood-ops N stop udp-flood stress workers after N bogo operations. File umask stressor --umask N start N workers that exercise setting umask and creat- ing/fstat'ing/closing/unlinking a file and checking the file mode is set correctly. This exercises umask mask val- ues from octal 0000 to 0777 inclusive. --umask-ops N stop after N rounds of exercising umask values 0000 to 0777. Umount stressor --umount N start N workers that exercise mounting and racying unmount- ing of small tmpfs and ramfs file systems. Three child processes are invoked, one to mount, another to force umount and a third to exercise /proc/mounts. Small random delays are used between mount and umount calls to try to trigger race conditions on the umount calls. --umount-ops N stop umount workers after N successful bogo mount/umount operations. Unlink stressor --unlink N start N workers that each run 4 processes per worker that create, open, unlink and close 1024 files in randomized or- der to exercise unlinking (removal) of files. This attempts to create races on file creation, linking and unlinking. --unlink-ops N stop after N bogo rounds of unlink operations on 1024 files by the controlling worker. Unshare stressor (Linux) --unshare N start N workers that each fork off 32 child processes, each of which exercises the unshare(2) system call by disassoci- ating parts of the process execution context. (Linux only). --unshare-ops N stop after N bogo unshare operations. Uprobe stressor (Linux) --uprobe N start N workers that trace the entry to libc function get- pid(2) using the Linux uprobe kernel tracing mechanism. This requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN capabilities and a modern Linux uprobe capable kernel. --uprobe-ops N stop uprobe tracing after N trace events of the function that is being traced. /dev/urandom stressor (Linux) -u N, --urandom N start N workers reading /dev/urandom (Linux only). This will load the kernel random number source. --urandom-ops N stop urandom stress workers after N urandom bogo read oper- ations (Linux only). Page faults stressor (Linux) --userfaultfd N start N workers that generate write page faults on a small anonymously mapped memory region and handle these faults using the user space fault handling via the userfaultfd(2) mechanism. This will generate a large quantity of major page faults and also context switches during the handling of the page faults. (Linux only). --userfaultfd-bytes N mmap N bytes per userfaultfd worker to page fault on, the default is 16 MB. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --userfaultfd-ops N stop userfaultfd stress workers after N page faults. SYGSYS stressor --usersyscall N start N workers that exercise the Linux prctl userspace system call mechanism. A userspace system call is handled by a SIGSYS signal handler and exercised with the system call disabled (ENOSYS) and enabled (via SIGSYS) using prctl PR_SET_SYSCALL_USER_DISPATCH. --usersyscall-ops N stop after N successful userspace syscalls via a SIGSYS signal handler. File timestamp stressor --utime N start N workers updating file timestamps. This is mainly CPU bound when the default is used as the system flushes metadata changes only periodically. --utime-fsync force metadata changes on each file timestamp update to be flushed to disk. This forces the test to become I/O bound and will result in many dirty metadata writes. --utime-ops N stop utime stress workers after N utime bogo operations. Varying load stressor --varyload N start N workers that vary the system load using 1 to N runnable varyload stressor instances. Depending on the --varyload-type the number of varyload instances running at any moment of time is changed to scale up or scale down the running load. Varyload instances are temporarily stopped and started by a controlling instance sending SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals to these processes. --varyload-ops N stop ater N varyload 1ms bogo cycles --varyload-ms M vary the load every M milliseconds (from 1 to 3600000 mil- liseconds). The load is changed based on the --vary- load-type option. --varyload-sched P select the scheduler policy, may be one of batch, deadline, ext, fifo, idle, rr or other. --varyload-method M select CPU loading method. The available methods are de- scribed as follows: Method Description all randomly select any one of all the following methods: fma perform multiply-add operations, on modern processors these may be com- piled into fused-multiply-add instruc- tions. getpid get the stressor's PID via getpid(2). time get the current time via time(2). inc64 increment a 64 bit integer. memmove copy (move) a 1 MB buffer using mem- move(3). memread read from a 1 MB buffer using fast memory reads. memset write to a 1 MB buffer using mem- set(3). mcw64 compute 64 bit random numbers using a mwc random generator. nop waste cycles using no-op instructions. pause stop execution using CPU pause/yield or memory barrier instructions where available. procname where possible, change the stressor process name. random a random mix of all the workload meth- ods, changing the workload method on every spin-loop. sqrt perform double precision floating point sqrt(3) and hypot(3) math opera- tions. vecfp perform multiplication and addition on a vector of 64 double precision float- ing point values. --varyload-type T select the varying load type. The available types are de- scribed as follows: Type Description all cycle through all the varyload types, running each type for 20 seconds at a time. brown repeatedly vary the load using brown noise, using random increment/decrement in load. triangle repeatedly vary the load from 1 up to N and then down to 1 in increments of 1. saw-inc repeatedly vary the load from 1 to N in incre- ments of 1 and then directly back down to 1. saw-dec repeatedly vary the load from N down to 1 in decrements of 1 and then directly back up to N. pulse repeatedly vary the load directly from 1 to N and then directly back down to 1. random randomly select load in range 1..N. Virtual dynamic shared object stressor --vdso N start N workers that repeatedly call each of the system call functions in the vDSO (virtual dynamic shared object). The vDSO is a shared library that the kernel maps into the address space of all user-space applications to allow fast access to kernel data to some system calls without the need of performing an expensive system call. --vdso-func F Instead of calling all the vDSO functions, just call the vDSO function F. The functions depend on the kernel being used, but are typically clock_gettime(2), getcpu(2), get- timeofday(2) and time(2). --vdso-ops N stop after N vDSO functions calls. Vector integer comparison operations stressor --veccmp N start N workers that perform various unsigned integer math comparison operations on various 128 bit vectors. A mix of integer vector comparison operations are performed on the following vectors: 16 x 8 bits, 8 x 16 bits, 4 x 32 bits, 2 x 64 bits and if supported 1 x 128 bits. The metrics pro- duced by this mix depend on the processor architecture and the vector math optimisations produced by the compiler. --veccmp-ops N stop after N bogo vector integer comparison operations. Vector floating point operations stressor --vecfp N start N workers that exericise floating point (single and double precision) addition, multiplication, division and negation on vectors of 128, 64, 32, 16 and 8 floating point values. The -v option will show the approximate throughput in millions of floating pointer operations per second for each operation. For x86, the gcc/clang target clones at- tribute has been used to produced vector optimizations for a range of mmx, sse, avx and processor features. --vecfp-method method specify a vecfp stress method. By default, all the stress methods are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one method to be used if required. Method Description all iterate through all of the following vector methods floatv128add addition of a vector of 128 single precision floating point values floatv64add addition of a vector of 64 single precision floating point values floatv32add addition of a vector of 32 single precision floating point values floatv16add addition of a vector of 16 single precision floating point values floatv8add addition of a vector of 8 single precision floating point values floatv128mul multiplication of a vector of 128 single precision floating point values floatv64mul multiplication of a vector of 64 single pre- cision floating point values floatv32mul multiplication of a vector of 32 single pre- cision floating point values floatv16mul multiplication of a vector of 16 single pre- cision floating point values floatv8mul multiplication of a vector of 8 single pre- cision floating point values floatv128div division of a vector of 128 single precision floating point values floatv64div division of a vector of 64 single precision floating point values floatv32div division of a vector of 32 single precision floating point values floatv16div division of a vector of 16 single precision floating point values floatv8div division of a vector of 8 single precision floating point values doublev128add addition of a vector of 128 double precision floating point values doublev64add addition of a vector of 64 double precision floating point values doublev32add addition of a vector of 32 double precision floating point values doublev16add addition of a vector of 16 double precision floating point values doublev8add addition of a vector of 8 double precision floating point values doublev128mul multiplication of a vector of 128 double precision floating point values doublev64mul multiplication of a vector of 64 double pre- cision floating point values doublev32mul multiplication of a vector of 32 double pre- cision floating point values doublev16mul multiplication of a vector of 16 double pre- cision floating point values doublev8mul multiplication of a vector of 8 double pre- cision floating point values doublev128div division of a vector of 128 double precision floating point values doublev64div division of a vector of 64 double precision floating point values doublev32div division of a vector of 32 double precision floating point values doublev16div division of a vector of 16 double precision floating point values doublev8div division of a vector of 8 double precision floating point values doublev128neg negation of a vector of 128 double precision floating point values doublev64neg negation of a vector of 64 double precision floating point values doublev32neg negation of a vector of 32 double precision floating point values doublev16neg negation of a vector of 16 double precision floating point values doublev8neg negation of a vector of 8 double precision floating point values --vecfp-ops N stop after N vector floating point bogo-operations. Each bogo-op is equivalent to 65536 loops of 2 vector opera- tions. For example, one bogo-op on a 16 wide vector is equivalent to 65536 x 2 x 16 floating point operations. Vector math operations stressor --vecmath N start N workers that perform various unsigned integer math operations on various 128 bit vectors. A mix of vector math operations are performed on the following vectors: 16 x 8 bits, 8 x 16 bits, 4 x 32 bits, 2 x 64 bits and where sup- ported 1 x 128 bits. The metrics produced by this mix de- pend on the processor architecture and the vector math op- timisations produced by the compiler. --vecmath-ops N stop after N bogo vector integer math operations. Shuffled vector math operations stressor --vecshuf N start N workers that shuffle data on various 64 byte vec- tors comprised of 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 bit unsigned inte- gers. The integers are shuffled around the vector with 4 shuffle operations per loop, 65536 loops make up one bogo- op of shuffling. The data shuffling rates and shuffle oper- ation rates are logged when using the -v option. This stressor exercises vector load, shuffle/permute, pack- ing/unpacking and store operations. --vecshuf-method method specify a vector shuffling stress method. By default, all the stress methods are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one method to be used if required. Method Description all iterate through all of the following vector methods u8x64 shuffle a vector of 64 unsigned 8 bit integers u16x32 shuffle a vector of 32 unsigned 16 bit integers u32x16 shuffle a vector of 16 unsigned 32 bit integers u64x8 shuffle a vector of 8 unsigned 64 bit integers u128x4 shuffle a vector of 4 unsigned 128 bit integers (when supported) --vecshuf-ops N stop after N bogo vector shuffle ops. One bogo-op is equa- vlent of 4 x 65536 vector shuffle operations on 64 bytes of vector data. Wide vector math operations stressor --vecwide N start N workers that perform various 8 bit math operations on vectors of 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 bytes. With the -v option the relative compute perfor- mance vs the expected compute performance based on total run time is shown for the first vecwide worker. The vecwide stressor exercises various processor vector instruction mixes and how well the compiler can map the vector opera- tions to the target instruction set. --vecwide-ops N stop after N bogo vector operations (2048 iterations of a mix of vector instruction operations). File based authenticy protection (verity) stressor --verity N start N workers that exercise read-only file based authen- ticy protection using the verity ioctls FS_IOC_ENABLE_VER- ITY and FS_IOC_MEASURE_VERITY. This requires file systems with verity support (currently ext4 and f2fs on Linux) with the verity feature enabled. The test attempts to creates a small file with multiple small extents and enables verity on the file and verifies it. It also checks to see if the file has verity enabled with the FS_VERITY_FL bit set on the file flags. --verity-ops N stop the verity workers after N file create, enable verity, check verity and unlink cycles. vfork stressor --vfork N start N workers continually vforking children that immedi- ately exit. --vfork-max P create P processes and then wait for them to exit per iter- ation. The default is just 1; higher values will create many temporary zombie processes that are waiting to be reaped. One can potentially fill up the process table using high values for --vfork-max and --vfork. --vfork-ops N stop vfork stress workers after N bogo operations. vfork processes as much as possible stressor --vforkmany N start N workers that spawn off a chain of vfork children until the process table fills up and/or vfork fails. vfork can rapidly create child processes and the parent process has to wait until the child dies, so this stressor rapidly fills up the process table. --vforkmany-ops N stop vforkmany stressors after N vforks have been made. --vforkmany-vm enable detrimental performance virtual memory advice using madvise(2) on all pages of the vforked process. Where pos- sible this will try to set every page in the new process with using madvise(2) MADV_MERGEABLE, MADV_WILLNEED, MADV_HUGEPAGE and MADV_RANDOM flags. Linux only. --vforkmany-vm-bytes N mmap N bytes per vm worker for more memory pressure, the default is 64 MB. This also enables the --vforkmany-vm op- tion. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes us- ing the suffix b, k, m or g. Memory allocate and write stressor -m N, --vm N start N workers continuously calling mmap(2)/munmap(2) and writing to the allocated memory. Note that this can cause systems to trip the kernel OOM killer on Linux systems if not enough physical memory and swap is not available. --vm-bytes N mmap N bytes in total, this is shared by each vm worker, the default is 256 MB. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --vm-flush cache flush mapped memory after each memory region has been completely written to. --vm-hang N sleep N seconds before unmapping memory, the default is zero seconds. Specifying 0 will do an infinite wait. --vm-keep do not continually unmap and map memory, just keep on re- writing to it. --vm-locked Lock the pages of the mapped region into memory using mmap MAP_LOCKED (since Linux 2.5.37). This is similar to lock- ing memory as described in mlock(2). --vm-madvise advice Specify the madvise `advice' option used on the memory mapped regions used in the vm stressor. Non-linux systems will only have the `normal' madvise advice, linux systems support `collapse', `dontneed', `hugepage', `mergeable' , `nohugepage', `normal', `random', `sequential', `unmerge- able' and `willneed' advice. If this option is not used then the default is to pick random madvise advice for each mmap call. See madvise(2) for more details. --vm-method method specify a vm stress method. By default, all the stress methods are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one method to be used if required. Each of the vm workers have 3 phases: 1. Initialised. The anonymously memory mapped region is set to a known pattern. 2. Exercised. Memory is modified in a known predictable way. Some vm workers alter memory sequentially, some use small or large strides to step along memory. 3. Checked. The modified memory is checked to see if it matches the expected result. The vm methods containing `prime' in their name have a stride of the largest prime less than 2^64, allowing to them to thoroughly step through memory and touch all loca- tions just once while also doing without touching memory cells next to each other. This strategy exercises the cache and page non-locality. Since the memory being exercised is virtually mapped then there is no guarantee of touching page addresses in any particular physical order. These workers should not be used to test that all the system's memory is working cor- rectly either, use tools such as memtest86 instead. The vm stress methods are intended to exercise memory in ways to possibly find memory issues and to try to force thermal errors. Available vm stress methods are described as follows: Method Description all iterate over all the vm stress methods as listed below. cache-lines work through memory in 64 byte cache sized steps writing a single byte per cache line. Once the write is complete, the memory is read to verify the values are written cor- rectly. cache-stripe work through memory in 64 byte cache sized chunks, writing in ascending address order on even offsets and descending address order on odd offsets. checkerboard work through memory writing alternative zero/one bit values into memory in a mixed checkerboard pattern. Memory is swapped around to ensure every bit is read, bit flipped and re-written and then re-read for verification. flip sequentially work through memory 8 times, each time just one bit in memory flipped (in- verted). This will effectively invert each byte in 8 passes. fwdrev write to even addressed bytes in a forward direction and odd addressed bytes in reverse direction. rhe contents are sanity checked once all the addresses have been written to. galpat-0 galloping pattern zeros. This sets all bits to 0 and flips just 1 in 4096 bits to 1. It then checks to see if the 1s are pulled down to 0 by their neighbours or of the neighbours have been pulled up to 1. galpat-1 galloping pattern ones. This sets all bits to 1 and flips just 1 in 4096 bits to 0. It then checks to see if the 0s are pulled up to 1 by their neighbours or of the neighbours have been pulled down to 0. gray fill the memory with sequential gray codes (these only change 1 bit at a time between adjacent bytes) and then check if they are set correctly. grayflip fill memory with adjacent bytes of gray code and inverted gray code pairs to change as many bits at a time between adjacent bytes and check if these are set correctly. incdec work sequentially through memory twice, the first pass increments each byte by a specific value and the second pass decrements each byte back to the original start value. The increment/decrement value changes on each in- vocation of the stressor. inc-nybble initialise memory to a set value (that changes on each invocation of the stressor) and then sequentially work through each byte incrementing the bottom 4 bits by 1 and the top 4 bits by 15. lfsr32 fill memory with values generated from a 32 bit Galois linear feedback shift register us- ing the polynomial x^32 + x^31 + x^29 + x + 1. This generates a ring of 2^32 - 1 unique values (all 32 bit values except for 0). modulo-x fill memory over 23 iterations. Each itera- tion starts one byte further along from the start of the memory and steps along in 23 byte strides. In each stride, the first byte is set to a random pattern and all other bytes are set to the inverse. Then it checks see if the first byte contains the expected random pattern. This exercises cache store/reads as well as seeing if neighbouring cells influence each other. move-inv sequentially fill memory 64 bits of memory at a time with random values, and then check if the memory is set correctly. Next, sequen- tially invert each 64 bit pattern and again check if the memory is set as expected. mscan fill each bit in each byte with 1s then check these are set, fill each bit in each byte with 0s and check these are clear. one-zero set all memory bits to one and then check if any bits are not one. Next, set all the mem- ory bits to zero and check if any bits are not zero. prime-0 iterate 8 times by stepping through memory in very large prime strides clearing just on bit at a time in every byte. Then check to see if all bits are set to zero. prime-1 iterate 8 times by stepping through memory in very large prime strides setting just on bit at a time in every byte. Then check to see if all bits are set to one. prime-gray-0 first step through memory in very large prime strides clearing just on bit (based on a gray code) in every byte. Next, repeat this but clear the other 7 bits. Then check to see if all bits are set to zero. prime-gray-1 first step through memory in very large prime strides setting just on bit (based on a gray code) in every byte. Next, repeat this but set the other 7 bits. Then check to see if all bits are set to one. prime-incdec step through memory in large prime steps in- crementing bytes and then re-do again decre- menting bytes. rand-set sequentially work through memory in 64 bit chunks setting bytes in the chunk to the same 8 bit random value. The random value changes on each chunk. Check that the values have not changed. rand-sum sequentially set all memory to random values and then summate the number of bits that have changed from the original set values. read64 sequentially read memory using 32 x 64 bit reads per bogo loop. Each loop equates to one bogo operation. This exercises raw memory reads. ror fill memory with a random pattern and then sequentially rotate 64 bits of memory right by one bit, then check the final load/ro- tate/stored values. rowhammer try to force memory corruption using the rowhammer memory stressor. This fetches two 32 bit integers from memory and forces a cache flush on the two addresses multiple times. This has been known to force bit flip- ping on some hardware, especially with lower frequency memory refresh cycles. swap fill memory in 64 byte chunks with random patterns. Then swap each 64 chunk with a ran- domly chosen chunk. Finally, reverse the swap to put the chunks back to their original place and check if the data is correct. This exercises adjacent and random memory load/stores. walk-0a in the given memory mapping, work through a range of specially chosen addresses working through address lines to see if any address lines are stuck low. This works best with physical memory addressing, however, exercis- ing these virtual addresses has some value too. walk-0d for each byte in memory, walk through each data line setting them to low (and the others are set high) and check that the written value is as expected. This checks if any data lines are stuck. walk-1a in the given memory mapping, work through a range of specially chosen addresses working through address lines to see if any address lines are stuck high. This works best with physical memory addressing, however, exercis- ing these virtual addresses has some value too. walk-1d for each byte in memory, walk through each data line setting them to high (and the oth- ers are set low) and check that the written value is as expected. This checks if any data lines are stuck. walk-flush walk through memory a byte at a time writ- ing/flushing/reading 8 bytes of incrementing 8 bit data. For architectures that support user space cache flushing this will cause high data cache miss rates. write64 sequentially write to memory using 32 x 64 bit writes per bogo loop. Each loop equates to one bogo operation. This exercises raw memory writes. Note that memory writes are not checked at the end of each test itera- tion. write64ds sequentially write to memory using 32 x 64 bit direct store writes per bogo loop. Each loop equates to one bogo operation. This ex- ercises cacheless write combining (WC) memory type protocol for memory writes and is only available on x86 systems with the movediri instruction built with gcc and clang compil- ers. Note that memory writes are not checked at the end of each test iteration. write64nt sequentially write to memory using 32 x 64 bit non-temporal writes per bogo loop. Each loop equates to one bogo operation. This ex- ercises cacheless raw memory writes and is only available on x86 sse2 capable systems built with gcc and clang compilers. Note that memory writes are not checked at the end of each test iteration. write1024v sequentially write to memory using 1 x 1024 bit vector write per bogo loop (only avail- able if the compiler supports vector types). Each loop equates to one bogo operation. This exercises raw memory writes. Note that mem- ory writes are not checked at the end of each test iteration. wrrd128nt write to memory in 128 bit chunks using non- temporal writes (bypassing the cache). Each chunk is written 4 times to hammer the mem- ory. Then check to see if the data is correct using non-temporal reads if they are avail- able or normal memory reads if not. Only available with processors that provide non- temporal 128 bit writes. zero-one set all memory bits to zero and then check if any bits are not zero. Next, set all the mem- ory bits to one and check if any bits are not one. --vm-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --vm-ops N stop vm workers after N bogo operations. --vm-populate populate (prefault) page tables for the memory mappings; this can stress swapping. Only available on systems that support MAP_POPULATE (since Linux 2.5.46). Virtual memory addressing stressor --vm-addr N start N workers that exercise virtual memory addressing us- ing various methods to walk through a memory mapped address range. This will exercise mapped private addresses from 8 MB to 64 MB per worker and try to generate cache and TLB inefficient addressing patterns. Each method will set the memory to a random pattern in a write phase and then sanity check this in a read phase. --vm-addr-method method specify a vm address stress method. By default, all the stress methods are exercised sequentially, however one can specify just one method to be used if required. Available vm address stress methods are described as fol- lows: Method Description all iterate over all the vm stress methods as listed below. bitposn iteratively write to memory in powers of 2 strides of max_stride to 1 and then read check memory in powers of 2 strides 1 to max_stride where max_stride is half the size of the memory mapped region. All bit positions of the memory address space are bit flipped in the striding. dec work through the address range backwards sequen- tially, byte by byte. decinv like dec, but with all the relevant address bits inverted. flip address memory using gray coded addresses and their inverse to flip as many address bits per write/read operation gray work through memory with gray coded addresses so that each change of address just changes 1 bit compared to the previous address. grayinv like gray, but with the all relevant address bits inverted, hence all bits change apart from 1 in the address range. inc work through the address range forwards sequen- tially, byte by byte. incinv like inc, but with all the relevant address bits inverted. pwr2 work through memory addresses in steps of powers of two. pwr2inv like pwr2, but with the all relevant address bits inverted. rev work through the address range with the bits in the address range reversed. revinv like rev, but with all the relevant address bits inverted. --vm-addr-mlock attempt to mlock(2) pages into memory causing more memory pressure by preventing pages from swapped out. --vm-addr-numa assign memory mapped pages to randomly selected NUMA nodes. This is disabled for systems that do not support NUMA. --vm-addr-ops N stop N workers after N bogo addressing passes. Memory transfer between parent and child processes stressor (Linux) --vm-rw N start N workers that transfer memory to/from a parent/child using process_vm_writev(2) and process_vm_readv(2). This is feature is only supported on Linux. Memory transfers are only verified if the --verify option is enabled. --vm-rw-bytes N mmap N bytes per vm-rw worker, the default is 16 MB. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. --vm-rw-ops N stop vm-rw workers after N memory read/writes. Memory unmap from a child process stressor --vm-segv N start N workers that create a child process that unmaps its address space causing a SIGSEGV on return from the unmap. --vm-segv-ops N stop after N bogo vm-segv SIGSEGV faults. Vmsplice stressor (Linux) --vm-splice N move data from memory to /dev/null through a pipe without any copying between kernel address space and user address space using vmsplice(2) and splice(2). This is only avail- able for Linux. --vm-splice-bytes N transfer N bytes per vmsplice call, the default is 64 K. One can specify the size as % of total available memory or in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suf- fix b, k, m or g. --vm-splice-ops N stop after N bogo vm-splice operations. Virtual Memory Area (VMA) stressor --vma N start M workers that create pthreads to mmap(2), munmap(2), mlock(2), munlock(2), madvise(2), msync(2), mprotect(2), mincore(2) and access 32 pages in a randomly selected vir- tual memory address space. This is designed to trip races on VMA page modifications. Every 15 seconds a different virtual address space is randomly chosen. --vma-ops N stop the vma stressors after N successful memory mappings. Vector neural network instructions stressor --vnni N start N workers that exercise vector neural network in- structions (VNNI) used in convolutional neural network loops. A 256 byte vector is operated upon using 8 bit mul- tiply with 16 bit summation, 16 bit multiply and 32 bit summation, and 8 bit summation. When processor features al- low, these operations using 512, 256 and 128 bit vector op- erations. Generic non-vectorized code variants also pro- vided (which may be vectorized by more advanced optimising compilers). --vnni-intrinsic just use the vnni methods that use intrinsic VNNI instruc- tions and ignore the generic non-vectorized methods. --vnni-method N select the VNNI method to be exercised, may be one of: Method Description all exercise all the following VNNI methods vpaddb512 8 bit vector addition using 512 bit vector op- erations on 64 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpaddb) vpaddb256 8 bit vector addition using 256 bit vector op- erations on 32 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpaddb) vpaddb128 8 bit vector addition using 128 bit vectors operations on 32 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpaddb) vpaddb 8 bit vector addition using 8 bit sequential addition (may be vectorized by the compiler) vpdpbusd512 8 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 8 bit values followed by 16 bit summa- tion using 512 bit vector operations on 64 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpdpbusd) vpdpbusd256 8 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 8 bit values followed by 16 bit summa- tion using 256 bit vector operations on 32 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpdpbusd) vpdpbusd128 8 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 8 bit values followed by 16 bit summa- tion using 128 bit vector operations on 32 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpdpbusd) vpdpbusd 8 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 8 bit values followed by 16 bit summa- tion using sequential operations (may be vec- torized by the compiler) vpdpwssd512 16 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 16 bit values followed by 32 bit summa- tion using 512 bit vector operations on 64 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpdpwssd) vpdpwssd256 16 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 16 bit values followed by 32 bit summa- tion using 256 bit vector operations on 64 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpdpwssd) vpdpwssd128 16 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 16 bit values followed by 32 bit summa- tion using 128 bit vector operations on 64 x 8 bit integers, (x86 vpdpwssd) vpdpwssd 16 bit vector multiplication of unsigned and signed 16 bit values followed by 32 bit summa- tion using sequential operations (may be vec- torized by the compiler) --vnni-ops N stop after N bogo VNNI computation operations. 1 bogo-op is equivalent to 1024 convolution loops operating on 256 bytes of data. Pausing and resuming threads stressor --wait N start N workers that spawn off two children; one spins in a pause(2) loop, the other continually stops and continues the first. The controlling process waits on the first child to be resumed by the delivery of SIGCONT using waitpid(2) and waitid(2). --wait-ops N stop after N bogo wait operations. CPU wait instruction stressor --waitcpu N start N workers that exercise processor wait instructions. For x86 these are pause, tpause and umwait (when available) and nop. For ARM the yield instruction is used. For PPC64 the yield, mdoio and mdooom instructions are used. For RISC-V the pause instruction is used. For Loong64 the dbar instruction is used. For other architectures no-op instruc- tions are used. --waitcpu-ops N stop after N bogo processor wait operations. Watchdog stressor --watchdog N start N workers that exercising the /dev/watchdog watchdog interface by opening it, perform various watchdog specific ioctl(2) commands on the device and close it. Before clos- ing the special watchdog magic close message is written to the device to try and force it to never trip a watchdog re- boot after the stressor has been run. Note that this stressor needs to be run as root with the --pathological option and is only available on Linux. --watchdog-ops N stop after N bogo operations on the watchdog device. Libc wide characterstring function stressor --wcs N start N workers that exercise various libc wide character string functions on random strings. --wcs-method wcsfunc select a specific libc wide character string function to stress. Available string functions to stress are: all, wc- scasecmp, wcscat, wcschr, wcscoll, wcscmp, wcscpy, wcslen, wcsncasecmp, wcsncat, wcsncmp, wcsrchr and wcsxfrm. The `all' method is the default and will exercise all the string methods. --wcs-ops N stop after N bogo wide character string operations. scheduler workload stressor --workload N start N workers that exercise the scheduler with items of work that are started at random times with random sleep de- lays between work items. By default a 100000 microsecond slice of time has 100 work items that start at random times during the slice. The work items by default run for a quanta of 1000 microseconds scaled by the percentage work load (default of 30%). For a slice of S microseconds and a work item quanta duration of Q microseconds, S / Q work items are executed per slice. For a work load of L percent, the run time per item is the quanta Q x L / 100 microsec- onds. The --workload-threads option allows work items to be taken from a queue and run concurrently if the schedul- ing run times overlap. If a work item is already running when a new work item is scheduled to run then the new work item is delayed and starts directly after the completion of the currently run- ning work item when running with the default of zero worker threads. This emulates bursty scheduled compute, such as handling input packets where one may have lots of work items bunched together or with random unpredictable delays between work items. --workload-load L specify the percentage run time load of each work item with respect to the run quanta duration. Essentially the run du- ration of each work item is the quanta duration Q x L / 100. --workload-method method select the workload method. Each quanta of execution time is consumed using a tight spin-loop executing a workload method. The available methods are described as follows: Method Description all randomly select any one of all the following methods: fma perform multiply-add operations, on modern processors these may be com- piled into fused-multiply-add instruc- tions. getpid get the stressor's PID via getpid(2). time get the current time via time(2). inc64 increment a 64 bit integer. memmove copy (move) a 1 MB buffer using mem- move(3). memread read from a 1 MB buffer using fast memory reads. memset write to a 1 MB buffer using mem- set(3). mcw64 compute 64 bit random numbers using a mwc random generator. nop waste cycles using no-op instructions. pause stop execution using CPU pause/yield or memory barrier instructions where available. procname where possible, change the stressor process name. random a random mix of all the workload meth- ods, changing the workload method on every spin-loop. sqrt perform double precision floating point sqrt(3) and hypot(3) math opera- tions. vecfp perform multiplication and addition on a vector of 64 double precision float- ing point values. --workload-sched [ batch | deadline | ext | fifo | idle | other | rr ] select scheduling policy. Note that deadline, fifo and rr require root privilege. --workload-slice-us S specify the duration of each scheduling slice in microsec- onds. The default is 100000 microseconds (0.1 seconds). --workload-quanta-us Q specify the duration of each work item in microseconds. The default is 1000 microseconds (1 millisecond). --workload-threads N use N process threads to take scheduler work items of a workqueue and run the work item (default is 2). When N is 0, no threads are used and the work items are run back-to- back sequentially without using work queue. Using more than 2 threads allows work items to be handled concurrently if enough idle processors are available. --workload-dist [ cluster | even | poisson | random1 | random2 | random3 ] specify the scheduling distribution of work items, the de- fault is cluster. The distribution methods are described as follows: Method Description cluster cluster 2/3 of the start times to try to start at the random time during the time slice, with the other 1/3 of start times evenly randomly distrib- uted using a single random variable. The clustered start times causes a burst of items to be sched- uled in a bunch with no delays between each clus- tered work item. even evenly distribute scheduling start times across the workload slice poisson generate scheduling events that occur individually at random moments, but which tend to occur at an average rate (known as a Poisson process). random1 evenly randomly distribute scheduling start times using a single random variable. random2 randomly distribute scheduling start times using a sum of two random variables, much like throwing 2 dice. random3 randomly distribute scheduling start times using a sum of three random variables, much like throwing 3 dice. --workload-ops N stop the workload workers after N workload bogo-operations. x86 cpuid stressor --x86cpuid N start N workers that exercise the x86 cpuid instruction with 18 different leaf types. --x86cpuid-ops N stop after N iterations that exercise the different cpuid leaf types. x86-64 syscall stressor (Linux) --x86syscall N start N workers that repeatedly exercise the x86-64 syscall instruction to call the getcpu(2), geteuid(2), getgid(2), getpid(2), gettimeofday(2) and time(2) system calls using the Linux vsyscall handler. Only for Linux. --x86syscall-func F Instead of exercising the 6 syscall system calls, just call the syscall function F. The function F must be one of getcpu, geteuid, getgid, getpid, gettimeofday or time. --x86syscall-ops N stop after N x86syscall system calls. Extended file attributes stressor --xattr N start N workers that create, update and delete batches of extended attributes on a file. --xattr-ops N stop after N bogo extended attribute operations. Yield scheduling stressor -y N, --yield N start N workers that call sched_yield(2). This stressor en- sures that at least 2 child processes per CPU exercise shield_yield(2) no matter how many workers are specified, thus always ensuring rapid context switching. --yield-ops N stop yield stress workers after N sched_yield(2) bogo oper- ations. --yield-procs N specify the number of child processes to run per stressor instance. The default is 2, range 1 to 65536. --yield-sched [ batch | deadline | ext | fifo | idle | other | rr ] select scheduling policy. Note that deadline, fifo and rr require root privilege. /dev/zero stressor --zero N start N workers that exercise /dev/zero with read(2), lseek(2), ioctl(2) and mmap(2) calls. For just /dev/zero read benchmarking use the --zero-read option. --zero-ops N stop zero stress workers after N /dev/zero bogo read opera- tions. --zero-read just read /dev/zero with 4 K reads with no additional exer- cising on /dev/zero. Zlib stressor --zlib N start N workers compressing and decompressing random data using zlib. Each worker has two processes, one that com- presses random data and pipes it to another process that decompresses the data. This stressor exercises CPU, cache and memory. --zlib-level L specify the compression level (0..9), where 0 = no compres- sion, 1 = fastest compression and 9 = best compression. --zlib-mem-level L specify the reserved compression state memory for zlib. Default is 8. Value 1 minimum memory usage. 9 maximum memory usage. --zlib-method method specify the type of random data to send to the zlib li- brary. By default, the data stream is created from a ran- dom selection of the different data generation processes. However one can specify just one method to be used if re- quired. Available zlib data generation methods are de- scribed as follows: Method Description 00ff randomly distributed 0x00 and 0xFF values. ascii01 randomly distributed ASCII 0 and 1 characters. asciidigits randomly distributed ASCII digits in the range of 0 and 9. bcd packed binary coded decimals, 0..99 packed into 2 4-bit nybbles. binary 32 bit random numbers. brown 8 bit brown noise (Brownian motion/Random Walk noise). double double precision floating point numbers from sin(<theta>). fixed data stream is repeated 0x04030201. gcr random values as 4 x 4 bit data turned into 4 x 5 bit group coded recording (GCR) patterns. Each 5 bit GCR value starts or ends with at most one zero bit so that concatenated GCR codes have no more than two zero bits in a row. gray 16 bit gray codes generated from an increment- ing counter. inc16 16 bit incrementing values starting from a random 16 bit value. latin Random latin sentences from a sample of Lorem Ipsum text. lehmer Fast random values generated using Lehmer's generator using a 128 bit multiply. lfsr32 Values generated from a 32 bit Galois linear feedback shift register using the polynomial x^32 + x^31 + x^29 + x + 1. This generates a ring of 2^32 - 1 unique values (all 32 bit values except for 0). logmap Values generated from a logistical map of the equation Xn+1 = r x Xn x (1 - Xn) where r > ~ 3.56994567 to produce chaotic data. The values are scaled by a large arbitrary value and the lower 8 bits of this value are compressed. lrand48 Uniformly distributed pseudo-random 32 bit values generated from lrand48(3). morse Morse code generated from random latin sen- tences from a sample of Lorem Ipsum text. nybble randomly distributed bytes in the range of 0x00 to 0x0f. objcode object code selected from a random start point in the stress-ng text segment. parity 7 bit binary data with 1 parity bit. pink pink noise in the range 0..255 generated using the Gardner method with the McCartney selec- tion tree optimization. Pink noise is where the power spectral density is inversely pro- portional to the frequency of the signal and hence is slightly compressible. random segments of the data stream are created by randomly calling the different data generation methods. rarely1 data that has a single 1 in every 32 bits, randomly located. rarely0 data that has a single 0 in every 32 bits, randomly located. rdrand generate random data using rdrand instruction (x86) or use 64 bit mwc psuedo-random number generator for non-x86 systems. ror32 generate a 32 bit random value, rotate it right 0 to 7 places and store the rotated value for each of the rotations. text random ASCII text. utf8 random 8 bit data encoded to UTF-8. zero all zeros, compresses very easily. --zlib-ops N stop after N bogo compression operations, each bogo com- pression operation is a compression of 64 K of random data at the highest compression level. --zlib-strategy S specifies the strategy to use when deflating data. This is used to tune the compression algorithm. Default is 0. Value 0 used for normal data (Z_DEFAULT_STRATEGY). 1 for data generated by a filter or predictor (Z_FILTERED) 2 forces huffman encoding (Z_HUFFMAN_ONLY). 3 Limit match distances to one run-length-encoding (Z_RLE). 4 prevents dynamic huffman codes (Z_FIXED). --zlib-stream-bytes S specify the amount of bytes to deflate until deflate should finish the block and return with Z_STREAM_END. One can specify the size in units of Bytes, KBytes, MBytes and GBytes using the suffix b, k, m or g. Default is 0 which creates and endless stream until stressor ends. Value 0 creates an endless deflate stream until stressor stops. n creates an stream of n bytes over and over again. Each block will be closed with Z_STREAM_END. --zlib-window-bits W specify the window bits used to specify the history buffer size. The value is specified as the base two logarithm of the buffer size (e.g. value 9 is 2^9 = 512 bytes). Default is 15. Value -8-(-15) raw deflate format. 8-15 zlib format. 24-31 gzip format. 40-47 inflate auto format detection using zlib deflate format. Zombie processes stressor --zombie N start N workers that create zombie processes. This will rapidly try to create a default of 8192 child processes that immediately die and wait in a zombie state until they are reaped. Once the maximum number of processes is reached (or fork fails because one has reached the maximum allowed number of children) the oldest child is reaped and a new process is then created in a first-in first-out man- ner, and then repeated. --zombie-max N try to create as many as N zombie processes. This may not be reached if the system limit is less than N. --zombie-ops N stop zombie stress workers after N bogo zombie operations. EXAMPLES stress-ng --vm 8 --vm-bytes 80% -t 1h run 8 virtual memory stressors that combined use 80% of the available memory for 1 hour. Thus each stressor uses 10% of the available memory. stress-ng --vm 50% -t 1h run virtual memory stressors on 50% of the number of online cpus for 1 hour. stress-ng --vm 200% -t 1h run virtual memory stressors on 2 times the number of online cpus for 1 hour. stress-ng --cpu 4 --io 2 --vm 1 --vm-bytes 1G --timeout 60s runs for 60 seconds with 4 cpu stressors, 2 io stressors and 1 vm stressor using 1 GB of virtual memory. stress-ng --iomix 2 --iomix-bytes 10% -t 10m runs 2 instances of the mixed I/O stressors using a total of 10% of the available file system space for 10 minutes. Each stressor will use 5% of the available file system space. stress-ng --with cpu,matrix,vecmath,fp --seq 8 -t 1m run 8 instances of cpu, matrix, vecmath and fp stressors sequen- tially one after another, for 1 minute per stressor. stress-ng --trig 25% --fp 50% --fma 25% -t 5m --verify run trigonometric function stressor on 25% of the online cpus, floating point stressor on 50% of the online cpus and fused-mul- tiple-add stressor on 25% of the online cpus for 5 minutes and enable verification of results. stress-ng --with cpu,matrix,vecmath,fp --permute 5 -t 10s run permutations of 5 instances of cpu, matrix, vecmath and fp stressors sequentially one after another, for 10 seconds per permutation mix. stress-ng --cyclic 1 --cyclic-dist 2500 --cyclic-method clock_ns --cyclic-prio 100 --cyclic-sleep 10000 --hdd 0 -t 1m measures real time scheduling latencies created by the hdd stressor. This uses the high resolution nanosecond clock to mea- sure latencies during sleeps of 10000 nanoseconds. At the end of 1 minute of stressing, the latency distribution with 2500 ns in- tervals will be displayed. NOTE: this must be run with the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to enable the real time scheduling to get accurate measurements. stress-ng --cpu 8 --cpu-ops 800000 runs 8 cpu stressors and stops after 800000 bogo operations. stress-ng --sequential 2 --timeout 2m --metrics run 2 simultaneous instances of all the stressors sequentially one by one, each for 2 minutes and summarise with performance metrics at the end. stress-ng --cpu 4 --cpu-method fft --cpu-ops 10000 --metrics-brief run 4 FFT cpu stressors, stop after 10000 bogo operations and produce a summary just for the FFT results. stress-ng --cpu -1 --cpu-method all -t 1h --cpu-load 90 run cpu stressors on all online CPUs working through all the available CPU stressors for 1 hour, loading the CPUs at 90% load capacity. stress-ng --cpu 0 --cpu-method all -t 20m run cpu stressors on all configured CPUs working through all the available CPU stressors for 20 minutes stress-ng --all 4 --timeout 5m run 4 instances of all the stressors for 5 minutes. stress-ng --random 64 run 64 stressors that are randomly chosen from all the available stressors. stress-ng --cpu 64 --cpu-method all --verify -t 10m --metrics-brief run 64 instances of all the different cpu stressors and verify that the computations are correct for 10 minutes with a bogo op- erations summary at the end. stress-ng --sequential -1 -t 10m run all the stressors one by one for 10 minutes, with the number of instances of each stressor matching the number of online CPUs. stress-ng --sequential 8 --class io -t 5m --times run all the stressors in the io class one by one for 5 minutes each, with 8 instances of each stressor running concurrently and show overall time utilisation statistics at the end of the run. stress-ng --class io\? show all the stressors in the io class sudo stress-ng --class scheduler --seq 0 -t 1m --taskset-random --progress --klog-check run all the scheduler exercising stressors sequentually on all online CPUs for 1 minute per stressor type, frequently changing the CPUs that the processes are running on, show progress and report any detected kernel issues. stress-ng --all -1 --maximize --aggressive run all the stressors (1 instance of each per online CPU) simul- taneously, maximize the settings (memory sizes, file alloca- tions, etc.) and select the most demanding/aggressive options. stress-ng --all 8 --with cpu,hash,nop,vm --timeout 1m run 8 instances of cpu, hash, nop and vm stressors altogether for 1 minute. stress-ng --seq 8 --with cpu,hash,nop,vm --timeout 1m --progress run 8 instances of cpu, hash, nop and vm stressors one after an- other for 1 minute each and show the run progress. stress-ng --random 32 -x numa,hdd,key run 32 randomly selected stressors and exclude the numa, hdd and key stressors stress-ng --sequential 4 --class vm --exclude bigheap,brk,stack run 4 instances of the VM stressors one after another, excluding the bigheap, brk and stack stressors stress-ng --taskset 0,2-3 --cpu 3 run 3 instances of the CPU stressor and pin them to CPUs 0, 2 and 3. stress-ng --taskset odd --cpu 32 run 32 instances of the CPU stressor and pin them to odd num- bered CPUs. EXIT STATUS Status Description 0 Success. 1 Error; incorrect user options or a fatal resource issue in the stress-ng stressor harness (for example, out of mem- ory). 2 One or more stressors failed. 3 One or more stressors failed to initialise because of lack of resources, for example ENOMEM (no memory), ENOSPC (no space on file system) or a missing or unimplemented system call. 4 One or more stressors were not implemented on a specific architecture or operating system. 5 A stressor has been killed by an unexpected signal. 6 A stressor exited by exit(2) which was not expected and timing metrics could not be gathered. 7 The bogo ops metrics maybe untrustworthy. This is most likely to occur when a stress test is terminated during the update of a bogo-ops counter such as when it has been OOM killed. A less likely reason is that the counter ready indicator has been corrupted. BUGS File bug reports at: https://github.com/ColinIanKing/stress-ng/issues - please note that no support will be provided if stress-ng is packaged without this manual. SEE ALSO cpuburn(1), perf(1), stress(1), taskset(1) https://github.com/ColinIanKing/stress-ng/blob/master/README.md AUTHOR stress-ng was written by Colin Ian King <colin.i.king@gmail.com> and is a clean room re-implementation and extension of the original stress tool by Amos Waterland. Thanks also to the many contributors to stress-ng. The README.md file in the source contains a full list of the contributors. NOTES Sending a SIGALRM, SIGINT or SIGHUP to stress-ng causes it to terminate all the stressor processes and ensures temporary files and shared mem- ory segments are removed cleanly. Sending a SIGUSR2 to stress-ng will dump out the current load average and memory statistics. Note that the stress-ng cpu, io, vm and hdd tests are different imple- mentations of the original stress tests and hence may produce different stress characteristics. The bogo operations metrics may change with each release because of bug fixes to the code, new features, compiler optimisations, changes in support libraries or system call performance. COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 2013-2021 Canonical Ltd, Copyright (C) 2021-2026 Colin Ian King. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 31 December 2025 STRESS-NG(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | OPTIONS | OPTIONS | EXAMPLES | EXIT STATUS | BUGS | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | NOTES | COPYRIGHT
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