cpuburn(1)

NAME
cpuburn, burnCortexA8, burnCortexA9 - a collection of programs to put heavy load on CPU

SYNOPSIS
burnCortexA8
burnCortexA9

DESCRIPTION
These programs are designed to load ARM Cortex 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. The programs produce no output, but signal hardware errors by a return code or (more likely) your machine locking up.
burnCortexA8 | is optimized for ARM Cortex A8 processors
burnCortexA9 | is optimized for ARM Cortex A9 processors

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,
    burnCortexA8 || 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 burnCortexA8

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

AUTHORS
cpuburn was written by Grégory Herrero <g-herrero@ti.com>.