cpuburn - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

cpuburn, burnBX, burnK6, burnK7, burnMMX, burnP5, burnP6 - a collection of programs to put
heavy load on CPU

SYNOPSIS

burnBX
burnK6
burnK7
burnMMX
burnP5
burnP6

DESCRIPTION

These programs are designed to load x86 CPUs as heavily as possible for the purposes of
system testing ("burn in"). They have been optimized for different processors. FPU and
ALU instructions are coded in an assembler endless loop. They do not test every
instruction. The goal has been to maximize heat production from the CPU, putting stress
on the CPU itself, cooling system, motherboard (especially voltage regulators) and power
supply (likely cause of burnBX/burnMMX errors). The programs produce no output, but
signal hardware errors by a return code or (more likely) your machine locking up.

burnP5 is optimized for Intel Pentium with or without MMX CPUs
burnP6 is optimized for Intel PentiumPro, Pentium II & III CPUs
burnK6 is optimized for AMD K6 CPUs
burnK7 is optimized for AMD Athlon/Duron CPUs
burnMMX tests cache/memory interfaces on all CPUs with MMX
burnBX is an alternate cache/memory test for Intel CPUs

USAGE

Burn testing is designed to make your computer glitch if it has hardware problems, so make
sure that nothing critical is running and all critical data is saved back to the hard-
drives. The best is to run it with filesystems mounted read-only. Note that root
privileges are not required.

Run the desired program in the background, checking the error result. You'll may want to
repeat this command for every processor you have in an SMP or HyperThreading system. For
example,

burnP6 || echo $? &

Monitor progress of cpuburn by ps. You can monitor CPU temperature and/or system voltages
through ACPI or using the lm-sensors package if you system supports it. When finished,
kill the burn* process(es). For example,

killall burnP6

Use cpuburn online using onworks.net services