Administering Networking OS — Computer Hardware #9

College Online Material

nemes.it

Viewing CPU Information

Processor

• Central Processing Unit (also known as the CPU or processor) performs the decision and calculations for the OS
• Connected to other hardware via the motherboard
• A multi-processor is system with more than one CPU
• Multi-core is more than one processor on a single chip

Two processor types x86 (32 bit) and x86_64 (64 bit). x86 invented in 1978, x86_64 invented in 2000. x86_64 is limited to 4GB RAM, x86_64 has limited software support

Viewing CPU info with one of the following commands arch and cat /proc/cpuinfo .

The /proc/cpuinfo file contains flags that describe key CPU features.

$ arch
x86_64
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 63
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz
stepping        : 2

System Information

Motherboard and Buses

Hardware communicates via the motherboard or buses. A Basic I/O System (BIOS) is what the hardware uses to communicate.

System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) is the standard that defines the data structures of the communications.

The dmidecode command displays SMBIOS info

RAM

Random Access Memory (RAM) is where program and system data are stored. Virtual memory (Swap space) is a hard drive space that is used when available RAM is lowed.

The free command can display memory utilization

Peripheral Devices

Device not directly attached to the motherboard are called peripheral devices

Two common types

• Peripheral component interconnect (PCI)
• Universal serial bus (USB)

View devices with lspci command

View devices with lsusb command. -v for more verbose info

lshw is information of list hardware

Disk Devices

Also called hard drives. Can be connected directly to motherboard, to PCI or USB. Two partition types

• Master Boot Record (MBR)
• GUID Partitioning Table (GPT)

Boot Record

MBR

Older technology. Still commonly used. Tools to view and modify MBR partitions

• fdisk
• cfdisk
• sfdisk

GPT

Newer technology allows for larger partition than MBR. Tools to view and modify GPT partitions

• gdisk
• cgdisk
• sgdisk

Device Names

IDE drives are assigned filenames that start with hd and are stored in the /devdir.

USB, SATA, and SCSI drives are assigned names that start with sd

The first drive is assigned the letter a, the second drive is assigned the letter b, etc.

• First IDE drive

$ /dev/hda

• First SATA drive

$ /dev/sda

• Second IDE drive

$ /dev/hdb

Partition Records

Partition Names

Partitions are assigned numeric values 1, 2, 3, etc.

• The first partition of the first IDE drive

$ /dev/hda1

• The second partition of the second SATA drive

$ /dev/sdb2

View partition and disk device on the system

The -l option to the fdisk command can be used to view partition info

Video Display Devices

No video standards, requiring specific drivers for specific video cards.

Two types of connections

• VGA
• DVI

Monitor and video card must both support the selected resolution. Typically X.org server determines proper resolution.

Configuration file:

$ /etc/X11/xorg.conf