Unrelated but see also 'stress' by Amos Waterland, an excellent workload generator to impose CPU, memory, I/O or disk stress on POSIX systems and report any errors that come up [1,2]. The tool unfortunately hasn't been maintained for some time, but it's being resurrected [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190307133628/http://people.sea...

[2] https://github.com/resurrecting-open-source-projects/stress