Determining maximum RAM upgrade possible of a system

Lyxix · 03-21-2014, 11:33 AM

Hopefully a quick question:

I know that in wonderful Linux, we have the "dmidecode" command that lists such exceptionally useful hardware information as the Maximum Physical Memory Capacity:

# dmidecode -t 16
SMBIOS 2.4 present.

Handle 0x1000, DMI type 16, 15 bytes
Physical Memory Array
Location: System Board Or Motherboard
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 32 GB
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Number Of Devices: 8

...which tells me I have 8 DIMM slots that can support a total of 32 GB (4 GB each slot)

Do any of you know of a method to gather similar information on Solaris operating systems? prtdiag and prtconf are getting me nowhere that I can tell. (maybe I'm just reading them wrong)

I heard of a perl script I could download/unzip/run, but I have to figure this info out on a ton of systems and I'm trying to avoid installing additional stuff if possible. I'm hoping there's already a built in command.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for your time.

-Lyxix

haertig · 03-22-2014, 12:41 AM

Have you tried "smbios"? It may be in /usr/sbin.

p.s. - I think smbios will only work on x86/amd64 architecture Solaris systems, not sparc. Not 100% sure though.

Lyxix · 03-24-2014, 04:29 PM

Looks like you're right about it only working on x86 architectures...or at least I can confirm it DOESN'T work on all of my SPARC-based Solaris systems:

smbios: failed to load SMBIOS: System does not export an SMBIOS table

Unfortunately, I don't have any x86 systems running Solaris (they all run some flavor of Linux). Thanks for the info, though!

Anybody have any other ideas?

-Lyxix

jlliagre · 03-24-2014, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lyxix

prtdiag and prtconf are getting me nowhere that I can tell. (maybe I'm just reading them wrong)

There is no simple way so I would suggest to use the memconf utility which is likely the perl script you heard about.

Here is a sample output:

Code:

$ ./memconf.v3.04.pl 
memconf:  V3.04 24-Feb-2014 http://sourceforge.net/projects/memconf/
Gathering data for memconf. This may take over a minute. Please wait...
hostname: v120
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Fire V120 (UltraSPARC-IIe 548MHz)
socket DIMM0 has a 1024MB (1GB) DIMM
socket DIMM1 has a 1024MB (1GB) DIMM
socket DIMM2 has a 1024MB (1GB) DIMM
socket DIMM3 has a 1024MB (1GB) DIMM
empty sockets: None
total memory = 4096MB (4GB)

It works fine with Linux too:

Code:

# ./memconf.v3.04.pl
memconf:  V3.04 24-Feb-2014 http://sourceforge.net/projects/memconf/
hostname: r940
TOSHIBA TECRA R940 (Dual-Core Hyper-Threaded Intel Corporation Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3340M @ 2.70GHz)
Memory Error Correction: None
Maximum Memory: 16384MB (16GB)
DIMM0 BANK 0: 8192MB 1600MHz Synchronous DDR3 SODIMM, Samsung M471B1G73BH0-CK0
DIMM2 BANK 2: 8192MB 1600MHz Synchronous DDR3 SODIMM, Samsung M471B1G73BH0-CK0
empty memory sockets: None
total memory = 16384MB (16GB)

Lyxix · 03-25-2014, 03:05 PM

Yes, memconf is what I was referring to regarding the Perl script. Sounds good - I'll just have to go that route. Thanks so much for everyone's help.

-Lyxix