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 Breakin is Advanced Clustering's stress-test and hardware diagnostics tool. Our staff developed breakin when we found that there was no product (commercial or open-source) available that could find the hardware issues and component failures as well as we wanted.
Our breakin application has proved to be so powerful at finding hardware issues it's now used by several major component manufacturers in their validation and factory testing procedures.
Installation and Running
Requires no installation, you boot from the breakin image to start testing. Breakin currently supports booting from: network via PXE, CD/DVD-ROM drive, or USB key.
Breakin is designed to be run nearly 100% unattended. After starting up breakin you will not need to answer any questions or press any keys. It will continue to stress-test your machine for as long as you like (we recommend at least 24 hours).
Download now
Breakin is available for free and can be downloaded directly from this website. Click here to access the downloads section of our site to get your copy of breakin today.
Open source
All the software included in breakin images downloaded from our site are open source with two exceptions: the Intel MKL library (used to load Intel CPU's) and the AMD Core Math Library (ACML--used to load AMD CPU's). Even the utilities written by us to build the breakin environment are open source. You can even build your own breakin environment. We have successfully built breakin from source on RedHat/CentOS 5, Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Hardy.
If you'd like to try building breakin yourself, check out the build control scripts from:
git clone http://git.advancedclustering.com/git/bootimage.git bootimage
Hardware Supported
Breakin should support any hardware supported by the Linux kernel. The main tests are optimized for both the AMD and Intel processor architectures using math libraries created by the processor manufacturer. We use breakin everyday on a variety of systems and architectures. Breakin has been tested and been known to work on:
- Breakin has been fully tested and known to work on:
- Should also work on the hardware:
Testing features
Advanced Clustering's breakin was built around a extensible testing framework. The main application can be extended as new tests are developed, and do to it's open-source nature anyone can extend breakin to add new tests. The current tests that are performed are:
- Full processor and memory test - Using HPL the supercomputing industry standard performance benchmark we fully utilize all processor cores and physical memory installed in the system. HPL is built with optimized BLAS libraries from both AMD and Intel - and the correct version is automatically selected based on the hardware the test is running on. Activating all cores and hardware at 100% utilization has uncovered power and thermal related design issues that were previously unknown.
- Hard drive stress testing - During Breakin's operation all of the hard-drives in the system are fully exercised and checked to find any faults.
- Temperature sensor reporting - With the support of the Linux hardware health monitoring package lm_sensors, any supported temperature sensor is reported.
- ECC error reporting - Using the EDAC Linux kernel patches breakin reports ECC errors on the following architectures and chipsets:
- Any Opteron system
- Intel sytems with: e752x, 82975x, s3000, s3100, or s5000 series chipsets
- Coming soon: s3200 and s5100 chipset support.
- MCE reporting - Report any MCE (Machine Check Exception) events generated by the system, which can often point to serious hardware issues.
Remote access to machines while running breakin
We realize that you might not be in the same room, building or even country as the machines that you are stress-testing with breakin. We developed full remote-access ability directly within breakin for this very purpose.
- Remote access via SSH - when booting up the breakin image you can specify the password for the remote SSH user. Then anywhere with network access you can login to the system running breakin and see it's current status. The information you get from the SSH session is exactly the same as you would get if looking at the monitor attached to the stress-testing machine.
Full logging support
Since breakin is designed as a startup and walk-away kind of test, we realized the need for full logging support. This way if the system was to crash or fail during testing you will have the output up until that point. Breakin is designed with three logging systems:
- Logging via serial console - If you have a console infrastructure in place, all test output, errors, and temperature data is logged via serial at regular user defined intervals (default is 30 seconds).
- Full time logging via USB key - When starting up breakin if a USB storage key or device has been plugged into the system, a log file written and continuously updated to the USB device (breakin.log on the root of the USB devices filesystem - DOS FAT/FAT32, ext2 or ext3 formatted devices)
- One time dump via USB key - If you didn't have a USB key in during startup, but find a need to output the current state of breakin (for example errors were detected, and you'd like to send them into our support department) you can do so. Just insert the USB device and press the function key highlighted on the screen to dump the log to the USB device.
Rescue environment
The breakin environment contains a number of the latest disk, networking and filesystem-related utilities. By passing startup=rescue as a boot-time parameter, the the image with start at a shell from which rescue utilities can be run.
Download now
Breakin is available for free and can be downloaded directly from this website. Click here to access the downloads section of our site to get your copy of breakin today. |
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