This project contains small programs that behave badly. They can be used for chaos engineering to test the system behavior and the infrastructure setup for those cases.

This program tries to divide a number by zero. It will immediately exit with signal 4 (SIGILL). This program is useful to test the process core dump configuration. See the Linux kernel sysctl setting kernel.core_pattern and fs.suid_dumpable for more information. In case of using a bug reporting system like apport, this program allows testing reporting the crash and retracing it.

This program will eat your memory like Obelix eats cake until it will eventually trigger the out of memory (OOM) killer. This program is useful to test configured cgroups memory limitations and the OOM killer behavior. leak-memory will use malloc to allocate 1 MiB blocks of memory in a loop until the given maximum memory size (by default 42 TiB) is reached. The allocated memory blocks will be filled with data to avoid optimization preventing the leak. The program will report its progress to make it easy to spot when leak-memory hits the OOM killer.

This program tries write to address zero and will trigger a segmentation fault (signal 11). It is useful to test the process core dump configuration. See the Linux kernel sysctl setting kernel.core_pattern and fs.suid_dumpable for more information. In case of using a bug reporting system like apport, this program allows testing reporting the crash and retracing it.

Contributions are welcome. Please follow How to Write a Git Commit Message for writing good commit messages.

To create a release, increase the version in Makefile, document the noteworthy changes in NEWS, commit and tag the release:

git commit -s -m "Release chaos-marmosets $(make version)" Makefile NEWS
git tag v$(make version)

The xz-compressed release tarball can be generated by running:

make dist