Summary

In this chapter, we learned that the Linux kernel can gather a lot of information about the system hardware and provide it to the user. In an emergency situation, it’s possible to retrieve all that information directly from the kernel, using the /proc and /sys filesystems and reading files such as /proc/cpuinfo.

However, high-level utilities such as lscpu, lsscsi, and lsusb can make it much easier to retrieve information and analyze it.

There are also platform-specific utilities, such as dmidecode for x86 PCs, that can help you retrieve even more detailed information that cannot be retrieved otherwise, such as the number of memory slots.

In the next chapter, we will learn about configuring basic system settings.