Tools

Here are some tools that can be used to exercise POSIX-like operating systems:

crashme

• home page is http://people.delphiforums.com/gjc/crashme.html
• from the man page:

  	crashme  is a very simple program that tests the operating
  	environment's robustness by invoking random data as if  it
  	were  a  procedure.   The  standard signals are caught and
  	handled with a setjmp back to a loop which will try  again
  	to  produce  a fault by executing random data.
  

dt -- data test program

• home page is http://home.comcast.net/~SCSIguy/SCSI_FAQ/RMiller_Tools/dt.html
• a generic tool for testing pipes, file systems, devices -- almost anything that supports a file descriptor.

Here are some examples, not covered in the dt users's guide:

/dev/zero

Read from /dev/zero with a blocksize of 8193 bytes. Verify the data read is all zeroes. This test will not finish until you interrupt the utility:
dt if=/dev/zero bs=8193 disable=stats pattern=0x0000000 limit=inf

TCP sockets

You will require the netcat utility to setup the TCP sockets and then exec the dt utility. You can setup dt to read/write 15MB of data to each end of the socket -- a bi-directional benchmark with data verification.

seek and write

• The first dt creates a file using seek and write. There should be 4095 bytes of data followed by 3 zeros. This dt will verify the 4095 data bytes, but not the zeros.
• The second dt verifies the zeros, created by the filesystem during the seek and write operation.

dt of=afile.out records=10000 bs=4095 step=3 position=0 pattern=0x39c39c39 disable=stats dispose=keep enable=bypass
dt if=afile.out records=9999 bs=3 step=4095 position=4095 pattern=0x00000000 disable=stats dispose=delete enable=bypass