This document discusses how to identify and review hardware information on Linux systems. It describes using commands like lscpu, free, vmstat, lsblk, and lspci to identify the CPU, memory, disks, and PCI/USB devices. It also discusses using dmesg and reviewing /proc/kmsg and /var/log/dmesg to see kernel messages about hardware. Finally, it introduces the dmidecode utility for delivering information about the BIOS, CPUs, caches, system details, devices, and physical memory.

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Hardware Profile
Adnan Alshulah

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Hardware Information
● Why do we need to know information about
hardware?
– Tuning the performance of a system.
– Troubleshooting potential hardware issues.

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Identifying hardware
● Identifying CPU
– lscpu “/proc/cpuinfo“ and x86info
● Identifying memory
– free and vmstat
● Identifying disks
– lsblk, hdparm -I “device”, and df
● Identifying PCI and USB hardware
– lspci and lsusb -vv

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Reviewing kernel messages about
Hardware
● The easiest, most detailed, and most direct source of information about
the hardware in a system is the Linux kernel
● Where does kernel collect messages?
– /proc/kmsg and /var/log/dmesg
– dmesg
● Information from dmesg?
– The kernel version
– The memory zones for allocation.
– The physical CPUs.
– The huge memory pages.
– I/O elevator
– Attached CD-ROM and Storage disk.
– Network cards

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The dmidecode utility
● The dmidecode utilty provided by the dmidecode package delivers
a wealth of information about local hardware.
● Which information we can get it from dmidecode?
– BIOS
– CPUs in the system.
– Caches of the CPUs.
– System Information
– Devices are listed
– Physical Memory
● Administrators can find various local hardware information
provided by the kernel in /sys/class/dmi/id.

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The dmidecode utility
● The dmidecode utilty provided by the dmidecode package delivers
a wealth of information about local hardware.
● Which information we can get it from dmidecode?
– BIOS
– CPUs in the system.
– Caches of the CPUs.
– System Information
– Devices are listed
– Physical Memory
● Administrators can find various local hardware information
provided by the kernel in /sys/class/dmi/id.