Solaris Tips : CPU Cache Sizes, Changing System Date

Tip #1: Finding the CPU cache sizes from Solaris operating environment

Use the prtpicl utility to list out system configuration, and look for the cache sizes within that output.

eg.,

$ prtpicl -v |grep cache
              :l1-icache-size    0x10000
              :l1-icache-line-size       0x40
              :l1-icache-associativity   0x2
              :l1-dcache-size    0x10000
              :l1-dcache-line-size       0x40
              :l1-dcache-associativity   0x2
              :l2-cache-size     0x500000
              :l2-cache-line-size        0x100
              :l2-cache-associativity    0xa

[Updated 01/14/13] The above output was gathered from an M4000 system that has SPARC64 VII processors.

Recent update releases of Solaris 10 and 11 show the prtpicl reported cache sizes in decimal numbers.

Here is a slightly improved prtpicl command that filters out unwanted output. (Courtesy: Georg)

/usr/sbin/prtpicl -v -c cpu | egrep "^ +cpu|ID|cache"

Tip #2: Changing the System Date

Use date to change the system date. For example, to set the system date to March 9, 2008 08:15 AM, run the following command. Syntax: date mmddHHMMyy

#date 0309081508

Sun Mar 9 08:15:03 PST 2008