Is there a way to know the size of L1, L2, L3 cache and RAM in Ubuntu?

Question

Is there a way to know the size of the L1, L2, L3 caches and RAM in Ubuntu?

Is there a terminal command or files I could look into?

Answer 1

CPU information

Use the lscpu command:

$ lscpu
Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                2
On-line CPU(s) list:   0,1
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    2
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            15
Model:                 6
Stepping:              5
CPU MHz:               2400.000
BogoMIPS:              6000.33
L1d cache:             16K
L2 cache:              2048K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0,1

Listed information is per CPU-core.

Memory information

There is the free command (-h gives results in human readable form, i.e. GiB rather then bytes):

$ free -h
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2.0G       390M       1.6G        10M        15M       160M
-/+ buffers/cache:       215M       1.7G
Swap:         2.0G         0B       2.0G

Answer 2

This will give you your cache information. Socket Designation will tell you which cache is being referred to in the section.

sudo dmidecode -t cache

For RAM there are a couple things to look at but meminfo should do it. I used grep here to only show total/free but you could use less or cat to see the whole thing. It shows a lot more information on memory size and usage than just size.

grep Mem /proc/meminfo

Answer 3

Based on jkabrams answer with following command and filtering "cache" from it, each cache item you have be shown.

lscpu | grep cache

and RAM:

free -h

For more information about RAM, processes and so on you can use htop on your distro. Install it like this on ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install htop

Answer 4

sysfs

for d in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index*;
  do tail -c+1 $d/{level,type,size}
  echo
done

Gives:

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index0/level <==
1

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index0/type <==
Data

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index0/size <==
32K

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index1/level <==
1

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index1/type <==
Instruction

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index1/size <==
32K

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index2/level <==
2

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index2/type <==
Unified

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index2/size <==
256K

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index3/level <==
3

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index3/type <==
Unified

==> /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index3/size <==
8192K

getconf

getconf -a | grep CACHE

gives:

LEVEL1_ICACHE_SIZE                 32768
LEVEL1_ICACHE_ASSOC                8
LEVEL1_ICACHE_LINESIZE             64
LEVEL1_DCACHE_SIZE                 32768
LEVEL1_DCACHE_ASSOC                8
LEVEL1_DCACHE_LINESIZE             64
LEVEL2_CACHE_SIZE                  262144
LEVEL2_CACHE_ASSOC                 8
LEVEL2_CACHE_LINESIZE              64
LEVEL3_CACHE_SIZE                  20971520
LEVEL3_CACHE_ASSOC                 20
LEVEL3_CACHE_LINESIZE              64
LEVEL4_CACHE_SIZE                  0
LEVEL4_CACHE_ASSOC                 0
LEVEL4_CACHE_LINESIZE              0

Or for a single level:

getconf LEVEL2_CACHE_SIZE

The cool thing about this interface is that it is just a wrapper around the POSIX sysconf C function (cache arguments are non-POSIX extensions), and so it can be used from C code as well.

Tested in Ubuntu 16.04.

x86 CPUID instruction

The CPUID x86 instruction also offers cache information, and can be directly accessed by userland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPUID

glibc seems to use that method for x86. I haven't confirmed by step debugging / instruction tracing, but the source for 2.28 sysdeps/x86/cacheinfo.c does that:

__cpuid (2, eax, ebx, ecx, edx);

TODO create a minimal C example, lazy now, asked at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14283171/how-to-receive-l1-l2-l3-cache-size-using-cpuid-instruction-in-x86

ARM also has an architecture-defined mechanism to find cache sizes through registers such as the Cache Size ID Register (CCSIDR), see the ARMv8 Programmers' Manual 11.6 "Cache discovery" for an overview.