Linux process kill

The Linux process kill fault kills the target processes running on the Linux machines. It checks the performance of the application or process running on the Linux machine.

Use cases

Linux process kill:

• Induces process kill on the target Linux machines.
• Disrupts the application-critical processes such as databases or message queues by killing the underlying processes or threads.
• Determines the resilience of applications when processes on a Linux machine are unexpectedly killed (or disrupted).

note

• This fault can be executed on Ubuntu 16 or higher, Debian 10 or higher, CentOS 7 or higher, RHEL 7 or higher, Fedora 30 or higher, and openSUSE LEAP 15.4 or higher.
• The linux-chaos-infrastructure systemd service should be in an active state, and the infrastructure should be in CONNECTED state.

Fault permissions

The fault uses the root Linux user and root user group.

Fault tunables

Mandatory tunables

Tunable	Description	Notes
processIDs	Comma-separated process IDs of the target processes.	Takes precedence over processNames and processCommand when all three parameters are defined. For example, 13453,32444,27436
processCommand	Command used to start the target processes. A substring match is performed to determine the target process.	Takes precedence over processNames when both are defined. For example, /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird
processNames	Comma-separated target process names.	For example, nginx,redis

Optional tunables

Tunable	Description	Notes
forceKill	Whether to force kill the process using the SIGKILL signal or SIGTERM signal for graceful killing.	Default: false.
duration	Duration through which chaos is injected into the target resource (in seconds).	Default: 30 s
rampTime	Period to wait before and after injecting chaos (in seconds).	Default: 0 s

Process IDs

The processIDs input variable targets process IDs to kill.

The following YAML snippet illustrates the use of this environment variable:

# process ids of target processes
apiVersion: litmuchaos.io/v1alpha1
kind: LinuxFault
metadata:
  name: linux-process-kill
  labels:
    name: process-kill
spec:
  processKillChaos/inputs:
    processIDs: "13453,32444,27436"
    duration: 30

Process Names

The processNames input variable targets process names to kill.

The following YAML snippet illustrates the use of this environment variable:

# process names of target processes
apiVersion: litmuchaos.io/v1alpha1
kind: LinuxFault
metadata:
  name: linux-process-kill
  labels:
    name: process-kill
spec:
  processKillChaos/inputs:
    processNames: "nginx,redis"
    duration: 30

Process Command

The processCommand input variable targets the processes, based on the command used to start processes, if available. A substring match is made on the given command to determine the target processes.

The following YAML snippet illustrates the use of this environment variable:

# process command of the target process
apiVersion: litmuchaos.io/v1alpha1
kind: LinuxFault
metadata:
  name: linux-process-kill
  labels:
    name: process-kill
spec:
  processKillChaos/inputs:
    processCommand: "/usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird"
    duration: 30

Force Kill

The forceKill input variable specifies whether to force kill the target processes using the SIGKILL signal or gracefully kill the target processes with the SIGTERM signal.

The following YAML snippet illustrates the use of this environment variable:

# force kill processes
apiVersion: litmuchaos.io/v1alpha1
kind: LinuxFault
metadata:
  name: linux-process-kill
  labels:
    name: process-kill
spec:
  processKillChaos/inputs:
    processNames: "nginx"
    duration: 30
    forceKill: true