StresKit

Lightweight bootable ISO based on Porteus containing a compendium of stress-testing related tools and utilities.

Setup

1. Download the latest StresKit ISO and burn it to a USB with Rufus then boot to it through UEFI. Ventoy (use grub2 mode if normal mode doesn't work) is another popular option
2. The login username is guest and the password is guest
3. After logging in, you can use the tools packaged in StresKit. See the Usage section for the available tools

Usage

• Toggling Mitigations
• Switch TTY
• Sensors
• Viewing Large Outputs
• Accessing Local Storage
• Linpack
• Prime95
• y-cruncher
• Intel Memory Latency Checker (Intel MLC)
• stressapptest (GSAT)
• s-tui
• FIRESTARTER

Toggling Mitigations

By default, mitigations are disabled. To enable them, remove the line that disables mitigations in porteus.cfg after mounting the ISO to a USB (or build a new ISO with the modified config). Enabling mitigations may provide a performance uplift for certain systems (1).

Display StresKit Help Message

Type skhelp to display the pre-login help message for a brief overview of the available commands.

Switch TTY

In cases where you need to multitask but can't interact with the main terminal such as wanting to view sensors while a stress-test is running, you can switch to another virtual terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 and complete your tasks on there. Switch back to TTY 1 by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1.

Sensors

Type watch sensors to view sensors. s-tui is also an available option. You can view sensors while a stress-test is running by switching to another TTY.

To monitor a specific sensor, specify the name of the sensor in the command watch sensors <sensor_name>. See example below.

Output of watch sensors:

nouveau-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
fan1:           0RPM
temp1:        +33.0°C (high = +95.0°C, hyst = +3.0°C)
                      (crit = +105.0°C, hyst = +5.0°C)
                      (emerg = +135.0°C, hyst = +5.0°C)

acpitz-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
temp1:        +27.8°C (crit = +119.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0:  +35.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 0:        +30.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 1:        +30.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 2:        +34.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 3:        +28.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 4:        +28.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 5:        +28.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 6:        +35.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)
Core 7:        +27.0°C (high = +101.0°C, crit = +115.0°C)

nume-pci-0400
Adapter: PCI adapter
Composite:    +28.9°C (low  = -273.1°C, high = +81.8°C)
                      (crit = +84.8°C)

Sensor 1:     +28.9°C (low = -273.1°C, high +65261.8°C)
Sensor 2:     +35.9°C (low = -273.1°C, high = +65261.8°C)

To only view coretemp-isa-0000, you would type:

watch sensors coretemp-isa-0000

Another useful command can be displaying the CPU frequency with the command below:

watch "sensors && cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz"

Viewing Large Outputs

Scrolling in Porteus is a bit tedious. For this reason, you can write stdout to a file while viewing the output simultaneously with the tee command. This also allows you to back up the output on a USB drive if needed which can be useful for other purposes such as saving them for later or comparing results.

<command> | tee -a output.txt

Learn the basic syntax of vi by watching this video. Use vi output.txt to view the output.txt file at any given time.

Accessing Local Storage

Sometimes you may want to access local storage whether it be the USB or your computer's drive.

To identify mounted devices, type:

ls /mnt/*

You can ls each of them to identify which is the desired storage device if the name isn't obvious.

Linpack

Linpack is a stress-test based on the Intel Math Kernel Library which solves a dense system of linear equations. The binary has been openly patched to run on AMD CPUs.

Usage:

linpack.sh [-m <gb>] [-s <samples>]

• -m is the memory size in gigabytes. If not specified, free memory minus 100mb will be used
• -s is the number of trials to run. If not specified, 100 trials will be executed

Prime95

Usage:

mprime

y-cruncher

Usage:

y-cruncher

Intel Memory Latency Checker (Intel MLC)

Usage:

mlc

stressapptest (GSAT)

Usage:

stressapptest

s-tui

Usage:

s-tui

FIRESTARTER

Usage:

FIRESTARTER

Building

The build.py script can be used to build the ISO. It is designed to run on ubuntu-latest for GitHub actions, but you can use a Linux distro of your choice.

git clone https://github.com/valleyofdoom/StresKit.git
cd StresKit/
python build.py