Learning about your system’s hardware setup within the Ubuntu terminal

In this post, I gathered the commands that are needed to know about the system’s CPU, GPU, system memory, disk, and how CPUs and GPUs are connected.

CPU

The primary processor’s information can be revealed with the following command.

lscpu

In the output, you will see the info as follows.

or we can use the dmidecode command that needs admin privileges.

sudo dmidecode --type processor

The valid values of types are:

To read about every Linux command use the “man” command like the following example:

man lscpu # the manual of "lscpu" command 

System memory

For knowing the size in KBs.

grep MemTotal /proc/meminfoStorage

For seeing the modules with more information about them, which needs admin privileges.

sudo dmidecode --type memory # processor, bios, system, baseboard, chassis, processor, memory, cache, connector, slot

DMI stands for Desktop Management Interface. To read more about it and dmidecode command, check the following link:

https://linux.die.net/man/8/dmidecode

Also, we can use the “top” command and we can observe how much system memory we have in total.

Storage

For checking storage disks, the following commands will give you the info you need.

lsblk

The output will be as follows, the type of the disk can be detected by its name.

output of lsblk

For example, the machine above has two NVMe disks: one with 7T and another with ~900GB capacity.

GPU

nvidia-smi

The output will be like:

CPU-GPU connection

nvidia-smi topo -m

The output will be like:

PCIe Connections

sudo dmidecode - type 9 # 9 or slot

The output will be as follows showing PCI slots with their version available on the system.

Some useful links for reading more about PCI

What Does PCIe x16 Mean? [Beginner's Guide]