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What do we check on a new system?

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What do we check on a new system?

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By: Bill Buros. 

This morning we got into a good discussion on what simple things that we check on a new system or partition for Power Linux.   The list was easy.

  • How many cores?
  • what SMT mode are the cores running in?
  • how fast are the cores running?
  • how much memory is available?
  • how is the memory balanced?
  • and is any of the memory tied up in Hugepages?
So we wrote a quick script here to get that information and thought we'd post that here.
 
Edit'ed Aug 3rd 2012:  See a new article "Setup and understand your system" for a more elaborate example. 
 
#!/bin/bash
# An easy script to check vital system info
echo "Check the number of cores enabled"
ls /proc/device-tree/cpus/ | grep -c PowerPC
echo -e "\nCheck the SMT mode:"
ppc64_cpu --smt
echo -e "\nCheck the expected number of CPUs that are online (based on SMT):"
grep -c proc /proc/cpuinfo
echo -e "\nCheck how fast the CPUs are running"
ppc64_cpu --frequency
echo "Check the total system memory and free memory available:"
grep Mem /proc/meminfo
echo -e "\nCheck how the total memory for each NUMA node is balanced:"
cat /sys/devices/system/node/node*/meminfo | grep MemTotal
echo -e "\nCheck how the free memory for each NUMA node is balanced:"
cat /sys/devices/system/node/node*/meminfo | grep MemFree
echo -e "\nCheck for any HugePage usage:"
grep Huge /proc/meminfo
 
 

Copy/paste that to your system into a script, turn the executable bit on, and give it a shot. 

 
> vi verify.sh
    (copy/paste the above into the script - file and exit)
> chmod +x verify.sh
> ./verify.sh

When you run it, it should give you a quick listing of what you have on your system or partition.    Here's a quick example which I ran in a Power7 LPAR which was defined with 8 cores and 64GB of memory.

 

  
# ./verify.sh
Check the number of cores enabled
8

Check the SMT mode:
SMT is on

Check the expected number of CPUs that are online (based on SMT):
32

Check how fast the CPUs are running
min:	3.56 GHz (cpu 30)
max:	3.56 GHz (cpu 18)
avg:	3.56 GHz

Check the total system memory and free memory available:
MemTotal:       64208512 kB
MemFree:        62304000 kB

Check how the total memory for each NUMA node is balanced:
Node 0 MemTotal:       65536000 kB

Check how the free memory for each NUMA node is balanced:
Node 0 MemFree:        62304000 kB

Check for any HugePage usage:
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:      16384 kB
Thanks to Jenifer for the quick script.    Next we'll check the distro and the various important packages that we use for performance.
 

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