x86info.

Somewhere in the mists of time, there was a program by Phil Karn (KA9Q) called cpuid, which identified CPU. It didn't get updated very often, and quickly got out of date. It also didn't do much more than just simple decoding.

x86info was written to succeed Phils work. Initially, it borrowed some bits from his code, but the last remnants are now long gone. Additional functionality has been added, such as support for SMP, and building on non-Linux platforms. (Solaris, and FreeBSD should work).

Features:

• SMP support.
• Recognition of all Intel/AMD/Centaur/Cyrix/VIA CPUs.
• Parsing of model specific registers.
• Approximation of current CPU MHz.

Requirements:

• On Linux, at least version 2.4 of glibc is required.

• For usage of the MSR / SMP functions, x86info needs the x86 cpuid driver provided with the Linux kernel since 2.2.18 / 2.4.0, and the appropriate nodes in /dev

  To set up these devices, do the following..

  mkdir /dev/cpu for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 do mkdir /dev/cpu/$i ; cd /dev/cpu/$i mknod cpuid c 203 $i mknod msr c 202 $i done

• If you are using the cpuid / msr drivers built as modules as opposed to built into the kernel, then you should ensure the following is in your /etc/modprobe.conf:

  alias char-major-202 msr alias char-major-203 cpuid

Info on the command line switches can be found in the man page.