Getting CPU ID Serial Number in Perl for win32 - windows

How to get CPU/Processor serial number or unique ID in perl for windows machine without using any modules, probably using syscalls or something?

http://metacpan.org/pod/Win32::SystemInfo. Without modules you can learn source code of this module and use it. You will see that module imports function GetSystemInfo from kernel32.dll and than uses it, you can do it in the same way

You can't get a CPU serial number. For a brief time, Intel issued a series of Pentium III processors where each chip had a unique serial number. It became a PR mess for them over privacy concerns and they discontinued that set of instructions in subsequent processor releases.
But if you are looking for a "unique id" for a Windows install that is mostly guaranteed to by unique, you can try any of the following:
Generate a unique GUID (uuidgen, CoCreateGuid), save it out to the registry/disk, then read it back later.
Get the Machine SID. http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=645077

Related

Using SetupDiSetDeviceRegistryProperty with SPDRP_HARDWAREID

The docs for the SetupDiSetDeviceRegistryProperty function say,
The following values are reserved for use by the operating system and
cannot be used in the Property parameter ...
SPDRP_HARDWAREID
However, there are lots of examples of code out there, including MS DevCon utility which uses this function with the SPDRP_HARDWAREID parameter, ie:
SetupDiSetDeviceRegistryProperty(DeviceInfoSet,
&DeviceInfoData,
SPDRP_HARDWAREID,
(LPBYTE)hwIdList,
(lstrlen(hwIdList)+1+1)*sizeof(TCHAR)))
They also have an article which suggests doing so:
If an installer detects a non-PnP device, the installer should select a driver for the device as follows: create a device information element (SetupDiCreateDeviceInfo), set the SPDRP_HARDWAREID property by calling SetupDiSetDeviceRegistryProperty
I'd like to (and do) use this function to set Hardware ID for my virtual device. The question is - is it a typo in the manual, or it's some sort of unsupported behavior and therefore it can stop working any time?
TL;DR: If you're creating a root-enumerated device node, you're free to set SPDRP_HARDWAREID/SPDRP_COMPATIBLEIDS yourself by calling SetupDiSetDeviceRegistryProperty. Otherwise you're not allowed to do so.
This was an error in the docs that was fixed at some point.
Today the docs of SetupDiSetDeviceRegistryProperty read:
SPDRP_HARDWAREID or SPDRP_COMPATIBLEIDS can only be used when DeviceInfoData represents a root-enumerated device. For other devices, the bus driver reports hardware and compatible IDs when enumerating a child device after receiving IRP_MN_QUERY_ID. [Emphasis mine]
... which is exactly what DevCon does.

getting system time in Vxworks

is there anyways to get the system time in VxWorks besides tickGet() and tickAnnounce? I want to measure the time between the task switches of a specified task but I think the precision of tickGet() is not good enough because the the two tickGet() values at the beggining and the end of taskSwitchHookAdd function is always the same!
If you are looking to try and time task switches, I would assume you need a timer at least at the microsecond (us) level.
Usually, timers/clocks this fine grained are only provided by the platform you are running on. If you are working on an embedded system, you can try and read thru the manuals for your board support package (if there is one) to see if there are any functions provided to access various timers on a board.
A more low level solution would be to figure out the processor that is running on your system and then write some simple assembly code to poll the processor's internal timebase register (TBR). This might require a bit of research on the processor you are running on, but could be easily done.
If you are running on a PPC based processor, you can use the code below to read the TBR:
loop: mftbu rx #load most significant half from TBU
mftbl ry #load least significant half from TBL
mftbu rz #load from TBU again
cmpw rz,rx #see if 'old' = 'new'
bne loop #repeat if two values read from TBU are unequal
On an x86 based processor, you might consider using the RDTSC assembly instruction to read the Time Stamp Counter (TSC). On vxWorks, pentiumALib has some library functions (pentiumTscGet64() and pentiumTscGet32()) that will make reading the TSC easier using C.
source: http://www-inteng.fnal.gov/Integrated_Eng/GoodwinDocs/pdf/Sys%20docs/PowerPC/PowerPC%20Elapsed%20Time.pdf
Good luck!
It depends on what platform you are on, but if it is x86 then you can use:
pentiumTscGet64();

How to set intel_idle.max_cstate=0 to disable c-states?

I would like to disable c-states on my computer.
I disabled c-state on BIOS but I don't obtain any result. However, I found an explanation :
"Most newer Linux distributions, on systems with Intel processors, use the “intel_idle” driver (probably compiled into your kernel and not a separate module) to use C-states. This driver uses knowledge of the various CPUs to control C-states without input from system firmware (BIOS). This driver will mostly ignore any other BIOS setting and kernel parameters"
I found two solutions to solve this problem but I don't know how to apply:
1) " so if you want control over C-states, you should use kernel parameter “intel_idle.max_cstate=0” to disable this driver."
I don't know neither how I can check the value (of intel_idle.max_cstate ) and neither how I can change its value.
2) "To dynamically control C-states, open the file /dev/cpu_dma_latency and write the maximum allowable latency to it. This will prevent C-states with transition latencies higher than the specified value from being used, as long as the file /dev/cpu_dma_latency is kept open. Writing a maximum allowable latency of 0 will keep the processors in C0"
I can't read the file cpu_dma_latency.
Thanks for your help.
Computer:
Intel Xeon CPU E5-2620
Gnome 2.28.2
Linux 2.6.32-358
To alter the value at boot time, you can modify the GRUB configuration or edit it on the fly -- the method to modify that varies by distribution. This is the Ubuntu documentation to change kernel parameters either for a single boot, or permanently. For a RHEL-derived distribution, I don't see docs that are quite as clear, but you directly modify /boot/grub/grub.conf to include the parameter on the "kernel" lines for each bootable stanza.
For the second part of the question, many device files are read-only or write-only. You could use a small perl script like this (untested and not very clean, but should work) to keep the file open:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use FileHandle;
my $fd = open (">/dev/cpu_dma_latency");
print $fd "0";
print "Press CTRL-C to end.\n";
while (1) {
sleep 5;
}
Redhat has a C snippet in a KB article here as well and more description of the parameter.

How to identify PC (motherboard) in win32 api? [duplicate]

How to uniquely identify computer (mainboard) using C#(.Net/Mono, local application)?
Edition. We can identify mainboard in .Net using something like this (see Get Unique System Identifiers in C#):
using System.Management;
...
ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("select * from Win32_MotherboardDevice");
...
But unfortunately Mono does not support System.Management. How to do it under Mono for Linux? - I don't know :(
Write a function that takes a few unique hardware parameters as input and generates a hash out of them.
For example, Windows activation looks at the following hardware characteristics:
Display Adapter
SCSI Adapter
IDE Adapter (effectively the motherboard)
Network Adapter (NIC) and its MAC Address
RAM Amount Range (i.e., 0-64mb, 64-128mb, etc.)
Processor Type
Processor Serial Number
Hard Drive Device
Hard Drive Volume Serial Number (VSN)
CD-ROM / CD-RW / DVD-ROM
You can pick up a few of them to generate your unique computer identifier.
Please see: Get Unique System Identifiers in C#
You realistically have MotherboardID, CPUID, Disk Serial and MAC address, from experience none of them are 100%.
Our stats show
Disk serial Is missing 0.1 %
MAC Is missing 1.3 %
Motherboard ID Is missing 30 %
CPUID Is missing 99 %
0.04% of machines tested yielded no information, we couldn't even read the computer name. It maybe that these were some kind of virtual PC, HyperV or VMWare instance, or maybe just very locked down? In any case your design has to be able to cope with these cases.
Disk serial is the most reliable, but easy to change, mac can be changed and depending on the filtering applied when reading it can change if device drivers are added (hyperv, wireshark etc).
Motherboard and CPUID sometimes return values that are invalid "NONE", "AAAA..", "XXXX..." etc.
You should also note that these functions can be very slow to call (they may take a few seconds even on a fast PC), so it may be worth kicking them off on a background thread as early as possible, you ideally don't want to be blocking on them.
Try this:
http://carso-owen.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-get-my-motherboard-serial-number.html
Personally though, I'd go with hard drive serial number. If a mainboard dies and is replaced, that PC isn't valid any more. If the HDD drive is replaced, it doesn't matter too much because the software was on it.
Of course, on the other hand, if the HDD is just moved elsewhere, the information goes with it, so you might want to look at a combination of serial numbers, depending what you want it for.
How about the MAC address of the network card?

Unique computer id based on CPU flags

I need to use unique computer id for the purpose of software licensing. I decided to use CPU Flags. On MSVC they are retrived with function __cpuid, and on gcc version 4.3 and up with the function __get_cpuid. I get an integer out of these functions which is sort of a bit array with the purpose to be used as unique ID.
What I'm not sure whether the CPU flags retrieved with the above functions can ever change? Can those flags be programmatically changed by the user? If not by regular application maybe through BIOS?
Thank you.
No, an end user cannot change them because each of the commands you listed is essentially a wrapper for an actual processor opcode cpuid that is provided in Intel (and Intel-clone) chips.
So this information is 'burned' into the silicon. No user can change it.
The following resources might be helpful:
1) Wikipedia's article on CPUID
2) Code guru article (2 pages) on accessing processor info using a call to CPUID
3) Table listing many processors by stepping, family, and model numbers
OK after some testing I can confirm that the flags from the 2nd byte of Info Type 1 are changing. So I will stick with Stepping ID,Model,Family and Processor Type values only.

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