Failing to verify RAM speed & type on Librem 15 & Kingston HyperX

Hardware
1

I’ve just installed 16gb of Kingston HyperX RAM on my Librem 15v4 and I’m trying to verify the speed and type, and neither dmidecode --type 17 nor lshw -C memory and providing me with any info. The best I can get is that there is 16gb installed. Is there another way to verify my RAM is what it says it is on my machine. I’m using Pure OS and Pureboot.

2

Can you paste the output of sudo dmidecode --type 17 for reference?

3

Yes, this is all:

sudo dmidecode --type 17

dmidecode 3.2

Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 2.7 present.

4

Hmm, strange. I don’t run PureOS on my laptop, but I do have a PureOS VM for testing various things, and even my VM gives me more output than that.

And you’re fully up-to-date via

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

?

5

Yes, everything is up to date. I don’t understand why it won’t return the speed/type info.

6

Maybe a question for @MrChromebox

7

In case it helps, here are two other outputs:

hwinfo --memory
01: None 00.0: 10102 Main Memory
[Created at memory.74]
Unique ID: rdCR.CxwsZFjVASF
Hardware Class: memory
Model: “Main Memory”
Memory Range: 0x00000000-0x3e94a9fff (rw)
Memory Size: 16 GB
Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown

sudo lshw -short -C memory
H/W path Device Class Description

/0/0 memory 1MiB BIOS
/0/1 memory 16GiB System memory
/0/100/1f.2 memory Memory controller

8

I swapped the RAM between my old 13v2 and that one detects and returns info on the RAM as expected, the 15v4 returns nothing regardless of what RAM is installed. I’m going to update the 13v2 to the latest version of PureOS to check if it’s a software issue.

9

Interesting. Certainly worth reporting back, but if that is the case, I suspect it may be a lower level thing. Is your 13v2 running the original AMI BIOS, while maybe your 15v4 has Coreboot/PureBoot?

1 Like
10

Oh, that’s right!! I didn’t even think about the fact that I’m running Pureboot on the 15 and Seabios on the 13. That’s probably where it’s going wrong.

11

I’d still be interested to know what difference between them is responsible for the difference in output from dmidecode - is it a bug, or is it deliberate? I’d need an expert to weigh in for that answer

1 Like
12

PureBoot is still based on coreboot 4.8.1, whereas the latest SeaBIOS firmware is based on coreboot 4.9. It’s possible/likely that some patches were merged post-4.8.1 to add more info to the type 17 SMBIOS table for the Skylake/Kabylake platform