Linux Test Project (LTP): Installation, Usage, and Stress Testing Guide

LTP (Linux Test Project) is an open‑source testing suite designed to improve Linux kernel quality, stability, and reliability by providing a portable, extensible collection of tests that run on many architectures such as i386, ia64, PowerPC, S/390, MIPS, and embedded systems.

The source tree is organized into documentation (doc), test driver programs (pan), test scripts (testscripts), test case library (testcase), runtest command files, header files (include), and libraries (lib).

To build and install LTP on a CentOS 6.6 x86_64 system, install the required tools and then compile:

yum install automake

yum install gcc

make autotools

./configure

make

make install

After installation the suite resides under /opt/ltp, and a variety of tests are available, including filesystem stress, disk I/O, memory management, scheduler, command functionality, system calls, NFS, floating‑point math, multithreading, IPC, and network stress tests.

LTP provides two main scripts: runalltests.sh runs a predefined set of tests serially, while ltpstress.sh runs a parallel stress‑test suite covering NFS, memory, filesystem, math, multithreading, disk I/O, IPC, system calls, and network load.

Tests are executed with the runltp command; for example, runltp -f sched runs the scheduler test, searching for test files under /opt/ltp/runtest if a relative path is given.

For stress testing, a typical command is: ./ltpstress.sh -m 35 -S -t 72 Result analysis can be performed with sar -u -f ltpstress.data for CPU usage, sar -r -f ltpstress.data for memory usage, and grep FAIL ltpstress.log | sort | uniq > failcase.txt to list failed test cases.

If errors such as missing rsh appear, install the required packages and restart the service:

yum install rsh

yum install rsh-server

/etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd restart

Running the scripts from the /opt/ltp/testscripts directory avoids common pitfalls.