cpuburn(1)

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

BUGS
Report all bug to submit@bugs.debian.org, for more information visit http://bugs.debian.org

AUTHORS
cpuburn was written by Robert Redelmeier <redelm@ev1.net>