CPU stress testing by percentage with native linux command

Question

I am currently running the following commands to stress test my CPU:

md5sum /dev/zero

Then I kill the process after 30 seconds.

pkill md5sum

I am looking to run a similar command but where it lets me stress the CPU by a certain percentage. I cannot use libraries like stress-ng, it has to be be able to run with basic linux distro like ubuntu. I also can't run a program as such, I have to be able to run it from the command line itself. Any suggestions or help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't believe this is possible without installing a tool (like cpulimit , available in Ubuntu apt repo) or by using cgroups , which is complex to configure and potentially requires kernel rebuilding.

The nearest standard feature is nice , which essentially sets the process priority. So without anything else running, it would still use all the CPU time, but any other processes would get CPU priority.