StressLinux For Linux

StressLinux is an openSUSE-based distribution of Linux that keeps things as minimal as possible, running only with command-line and designed to be used for system stress testing operations. It was built with the SUSE Studio tool.

The StressLinux operating system can be downloaded via Softpedia or directly from its official website (see link above) as two Live CD ISO images that have been archived with the bz2 compression algorithm and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.

The boot menu of the Live CDs includes standard options, similar with the one of the openSUSE operating system, which allow the user to start the live system with default drivers or in failsafe mode, boot an existing OS from the local drive, as well as to perform a memory diagnostic test.

You must choose a keyboard layout and vendor/mainboard before you can use the operating system. You will be dropped to a shell prompt, where you must type various commands (see below for details) in order to perform stress testing operations.

The distribution contains a wide-range of powerful tools, among which we can mention the stress tool for imposing certain types of stress on POSIX systems, CPUBurn CPU maximum load (heat) stability testing tool, CPU Burn-In CPU burn-in testing tool, nbench CPU test suite, iometer I/O performance meter utility and Busybox common UNIX utilities suite.

The hddtemp program for displaying the temperature of the disk drive, lm_sensors tool for monitoring various hardware components, lshw for listing hardware components, bonnie++ for HDD benchmarking, netio for network benchmarking, smartmontools for S.M.A.R.T. drive tests, x86info for viewing detailed CPU information and memtest86 for diagnostic the system memory are also included.