HWLOC-DUMP-HWDATA(1)

📦
version 2.15.0 · 15 versions
, in arch rolling

💅 HWLOC-DUMP-HWDATA 💅

okay so bestie, this is a page from the hwloc manual set, and it's all about a tiny little tool called hwloc-dump-hwdata 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

hwloc-dump-hwdata — dumps topology and locality info straight out of your hardware tables, no cap 🫶

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

hwloc-dump-hwdata [options]

💖 OPTIONS 💖

  • -o <dir> — writes the output files into <dir> instead of the default /usr/var/run/hwloc/ (that default was baked in at configure time, fyi).
lowkey you probably also wanna set the HWLOC_DUMPED_HWDATA_DIR environment variable, so the hwloc library goes looking for the dumped files in that same directory you just picked. otherwise it's giving mismatched vibes 😭
  • --version — reports the version and dips out. periodt.
  • -h --help — shows the help message and exits. iconic behavior honestly.

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the tea ☕ — hwloc can lowkey thrive on some locality and topology info that lives in SMBIOS or ACPI tables. on Linux you can reach those from raw hardware files under directories like /sys/firmware/dmi/ or /sys/firmware/acpi/. the catch? those files are usually only accessible to root, and they only exist when the Linux kernel has dmi-sysfs support in it. 🙈

enter hwloc-dump-hwdata, our main character 💅 — it takes the useful contents of those files and dumps them into human-readable and world-accessible files. the whole plan is: run the tool once during boot, and then let the main (non-privileged) hwloc library gather info from those human-readable files. slay, delegation 🔥

ngl, hwloc-dump-hwdata is currently only useful for Intel Xeon Phi processors (Knights Landing and Knights Mill). that's just the vibe right now ✨

the current list of dumped info is:

  • Intel Xeon Phi processor memory, cache and clustering configuration — gathered from specific SMBIOS entries such as /sys/firmware/dmi/entries/14-* and /sys/firmware/dmi/entries/160-*, and saved in the file knl_memoryside_cache. 💾

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

hwloc(7), lstopo(1)

ok that's the whole page bestie, go forth and dump 💖

version 2.15.0 🌈 dated Sep 23, 2026 — mwah, that's a wrap, catch you in the next manpage 🎀✨🫶

📦 where this page comes from