Stress testing for ext3?

[Christian]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Kieft, Brian wrote:
> Does anyone know of a good method for exercising
> an ext3 file system?

I'm not aware of such a "torture" tool, but any long run of your 
real-world-application of choice, some benchmarks or heavy operation on 
a big source tree or so should do no harm to any in-kernel 
rw-filesystem.

> Perhaps something that involves power removal in between commits
> or in the midst of a write,

start any of the things mentioned above and pull the plug ;)
maybe "reboot -f" could simulate this:

   -f     Force halt or reboot, don't call shutdown(8).

but I've never tried that and don't know if it will KILL running 
processes before rebooting.

> and then checks for corrupt data. Do any utilities exist for this?

fsck.ext[23] will do that for the fs structure. you could use diff(1) 
against a known-to-be-good filesystem to verify that all data is in
place.

Christian.
-- 
BOFH excuse #325:

Your processor does not develop enough heat.