StressLinux

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.

It’s distributed as 32-bit/64-bit Live CDs

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be downloaded via Softoware or directly from its official website (see link above) as two Live CD ISO images that have been archived with the bz2 compression algorithm and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures.

Boot menu à la openSUSE Linux

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.

The user will be dropped to a shell prompt

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.

Contains a wide-range of powerful tools

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.

All the tools are command-line based

In addition, 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.

What is new in this release:

• A new release (0.7.106) is out, which is a refresh of the basesystem and includes new versions of busybox, lm_sensors, mprime, smartmontools, memtester, netperf, ramspeed (added ramsmp) and y-cruncher.

What is new in version 0.7.105:

• The base system is now openSUSE 11.4 with updated drivers for r8101,r8168 and r8169.
• Stresslinux specific packages are updated as well, including busybox, iperf, lm_sensors, lshw, memtest86, memtest86+, mprime, smartmontools (svn r3314), x86info and y-cruncher.
• There is one known issue, memtest86+ is not working from within the ISO images. This seems to be an issue between the new package and the SUSE Studio build system and will be fixed in a later...

What is new in version 0.6.105:

• It updates some packages to current versions.
• These includes bandwidth, busybox, lm_sensors, smartmontools and memtester.
• All updates from the openSUSE 11.3 base distribution are included.

What is new in version 0.5.113:

• This small release fixes the memtest entry on boot and adds mprime to the distribution.

What is new in version 0.5.111:

• The base distribution is now openSUSE 11.2 with additional drivers for r8168 and r8101. The packages stress, bandwidth, x86info, smartmontools, busybox, sensors and stressapptest were updated to current versions. This release includes raid utilities for different hardware raid controllers, these include: tw_cli, arecacli, hpacucli, megacli, mpt-status and lsiutil. Wireless networks should also work better with this release. sl-wizard includes an entry for direct sensors-detect startup.