Sys.cpuinfo function

Provide Information about the Linux Hardware (CPU, Memory, etc)

Return information about the Linux hardware, notably the CPU (the central processor unit) and memory of the computer is running on. This is currently only available for Linux .

These functions exist on other unix-alike platforms, but produce an error when called.

Sys.procinfo(procfile)
Sys.cpuinfo()
Sys.meminfo()
Sys.memGB(kind = "MemTotal")
Sys.MIPS()

Arguments

• procfile: name of file the lines of which give the CPU info ``as on Linux''
• kind: a character string specifying which kind of memory is desired.

Returns

The Sys.*info() functions return a "simple.list", here basically a named character vector, (where the names have been filtered through make.names(*, unique=TRUE) which is of importance for multi-processor or multi-core CPUs, such that vector can easily be indexed.

Sys.memGB() returns available memory in giga bytes [GB];

Sys.MIPS() returns a number giving an approximation of the M illion I instructions P er S econd that the CPU processes (using bogomips ). This is a performance measure of the basic non-numeric processing capabilities. For single-core Linux systems, often about twice the basic clock rate in ``MHz'' (as available by Sys.cpuinfo()["cpu.MHz"]); now, with multicore systems, the result is often around (but smaller than) 2 * #{cores} * clock.rate.

Author(s)

Martin Maechler

Note

These currently do rely on the Linux /proc/ file system, and may not easily be portable to non-Linux environments.

On multi-processor machines, Sys.cpuinfo() contains each field for each processor (i.e., names(Sys.cpuinfo()) has duplicated entries).

Conceivably, the bogoMIPS source code is open and available and could be built into .

See Also

Sys.ps, etc.

Examples

(n.cores <- parallel::detectCores())
if(substr(R.version[["os"]], 1,5) == "linux") { ##-- only on Linux
  Sys.cpuinfo() # which is often ugly; this looks much better:
  length(Sys.cpu2 <- local({I <- Sys.cpuinfo(); I[ !grepl("^flags", names(I)) ] }))
  ## may still be too much, notably if n.cores > 2:
  (Sys3 <- Sys.cpu2[!grepl("[.][0-9]+$", names(Sys.cpu2))])

  Sys.MIPS() ## just the 'bogomips' from above:
  Sys.MIPS() / as.numeric(Sys.cpuinfo()["cpu.MHz"]) ## ~~ 2 * #{cores} ((no longer))

  ## Available Memory -- can be crucial:
  Sys.memGB() #- default "MemTotal"
  if(Sys.memGB("MemFree") > 16)
     message("Be happy! You have more than 16 Gigabytes of free memory")
}