On Feb 6, 2013, at 12:13 PM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Whether an asm would work would depend more on the compiler than on the OS;
...but, then again, maybe the OS has already done all the heavy lifting for you:
$ uname -sr
Darwin 12.2.1
$ sysctl machdep.cpu.brand_string
machdep.cpu.brand_string: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3820QM CPU @ 2.70GHz
I.e, on OS X, you can use sysctl() to get the brand string, at least on some x86 processors.
On FreeBSD 7 and 9, and OpenBSD 4.8, at least, hw.model gives you that information (it gives you the *system* model, e.g. MacBookPro10,1, on OS X).
On NetBSD 5.1, machdep.cpu_brand does it.
On at least some versions of Linux:
$ uname -sr
Linux 2.6.22-16-generic
$ egrep 'model name' /proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3820QM CPU @ 2.70GHz
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3820QM CPU @ 2.70GHz
The virtual machine in question is, to quote VMware, "configured to use: 2 processor cores"; I don't know whether that means that it looks like a single chip with two cores, or two separate chips, and I don't know whether Linux reports one or N model names for a single N-core chip. Do we want to report the number of CPU cores? (I don't know if any SMP machines have a mix of different CPU models, so I don't know if we need to worry about reporting multiple brand strings.)
