Probing for hardware information
dmidecode
The man page for dmidecode
warns that, because the command gives results quickly and securely, its output may be unreliable. Fortunately, so far as I can tell, that problem never seems to pop up, and dmidecode
provides a useful summary of a system's hardware, including the serial numbers and BIOS revision. You can search for a specific piece of hardware using --string
(-s
) KEYWORD
, --type
(-t
) DEVICE-TYPE
, or --handler
(-h
) DEVICE-ID
. The man page contains a list of the types of devices listed and a table of useful keywords (Figure 4).

lsusb
Modern computers depend heavily on USB devices, so it is only natural that a command was written to dig out information on them. By itself, lsusb
will give a complete list of USB devices. However, with -s [[bus]:][devnum]
you can display in decimal only the devices on a specified bus and/or devnum. Similarly, -d [vendor]:[product]
displays in hexadecimal only the devices with the specified vendor and model ID. As root, you can also use -D DEVICE-FILE
. As any account, you can use -t
to display information as a tree (Figure 5).

lscpu
This command displays information gathered from sysfs
, /proc/cpuinfo
, and architecture-specific libraries. You can run lscpu
with --extended
(-e
) to display more detailed information (just as --verbose
is used in some other hardware commands), plus --parse
(-p
) to optimize the formatting of the output. In addition, for even more detailed output, --out-all
can be added. Depending on the options, lscpu
displays as many as 13 columns of information, among them CPU
, CORE
, SOCKET
, and ADDRESS
. For virtual machines, it can also display CONFIGURED
, meaning whether the virtual machine is using the CPU, and POLARIZATION
, which indicates whether the virtual machine can switch the CPU dispatching mode between horizontal
or vertical
. Users can specify only online CPUs with --online
(-b
), only off-line CPUs with --offline
(-c
) and --extended
combined, or both with --all
(-a
) (Figure 6).

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