[LUNI] favorite burn in test

[Jesse Becker]

--- Martin Maney <maney@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 10:48:23AM -0500, Gene Jannece wrote:
> > Also, any RAM tests would be helpful too. 
> 
> memtest86 for a standalone test, of course.  But unless you don't really
> care much about memory errors, you chose the motherboard to allow support
> for ECC, so running anything that will exercise the system vigorously with
> the ecc module loaded is the real test.  Luckily, you can do that 100% of
> the time the system is running!  :-)

I'll second the memtest86 recommendation.  

There are woefully few dedicated burn-in programs for Linux.  There's an old
one called "Lucifer", but it is unsupported, and I doubt that it supports
newer chips (I just built an AMD system last week--we should compare notes
<grin>).  There's another called "CPUBurn": http://users.ev1.net/~redelm/ 
There's also a memory tester with this I think.

Software compilation using optimization should give the CPU interger
routines a good workout (If a kernel compile is too fast, try building
Mozilla or XFree86); however it won't help much for FPU stuff.  For that, I
suppose that  Q3 would work, and/or some serious mathematical computations
(perhaps a large Povray rendering?  http://www.irtc.org should have some
complicated scenes that will take a while, hunt around for something with
the source code...).

There's also disk tests.  Of course, you can run 'badblocks' to get a
surface test, but aside from that, the best thing I've found is a
combination of 'dd' and 'bonnie++'.  For mine, I ran these two things
several times, in addition to several invocations of 'bonnie++':
  dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null
  dd if=/dev/random of=/path/to/file/on/device bs=1024 count=<SizeOfFS>

If you want to run them for a long time, you can place them in scripts, or
use the 'watch' command (a nifty little utility):
  watch dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null
Just ctrl-C when you're done.

One nice thing about linux is that you can do all sorts of strange tests
with devices by reading and writing directly.

One thing that I'm still looking for is a good way of doing lots of random
drive accesses, instead of long sequential reads/writes.

--Jesse

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