Re: [dmidecode] Getting the speed of RAM using dmidecode

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Mark,

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:11:51 +0200, Mark Ryden wrote:
> Hello,
>         I have a couple of machines on which there are various
>         fedora distros (F10, F9 and  F8) and redhat enterprise distros.
>         On some of them lm_sensors run, on some lm_sensors does not run.

Not sure why you mention lm_sensors at this point?

>         I try to get the speed of the RAM using dmidecode but I can't. I do
>         get other helpful about the RAM (like size, type, etc). but the speed
>         entry shows: "Current Speed: Unknown". I had heard from other
>         people that
>         on their machines dmidecode **does** show the RAM Speed. I must add 
> that
>         these machines are x86_64 based, and some of them are really brand 
> new.
>         I know of course that I can get this info from BIOS (or open
>         the case and
>         look at the RAM sticks themselves) but I want to know why I
>         cannot see this with dmidecode ?
> 
>         I am using dmidecode-2.9-1.31.fc10.x86_64 (or lower version on the
>         other machines).

If you care about memory speed and don't want to depend on BIOS
correctness, then dmidecode isn't the tool you need. What you want is
the eeprom kernel driver together with the decode-dimms script from the
i2c-tools package [1]. It only works on systems where the SPD EEPROM on
the memory modules are exposed on the SMBus though.

[1] http://www.lm-sensors.org/wiki/I2CTools

-- 
Jean Delvare