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>

                                          June 04, 2011                                cpuburn(1)