[wellylug] Memory

[Daniel Pittman]

Rob Giltrap <rob at kiwihq.com> writes:

> Is there any Linux command that will tell me the characteristics of a
> machines memory?

dmidecode will look at the tables provided by the BIOS; accuracy varies
wildly.  On good quality hardware such as IBM servers it is accurate.
On a random gigabyte board I have here it claims I use eight 64MB EDO
SIMM with my Athlon 64+ ;)


You can also look at the lm-sensors package.  On most platforms the
SMBus or I2C bus allows you to load and read the SPD data from the
EEPROM on the DIMMs.

That is the same data that the BIOS uses to power up physical memory at
boot time and is much more likely to be accurate, assuming it is
accessible.


Finally I believe that an IPMI supporting chassis will be able to report
those details, at least in most cases.

> Or is this masked by the bios and the system just sees one big chunk
> of memory?

Things like the timing information, mostly, and no OS goes out of its
way to gather those details -- they just don't matter that much.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
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