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Identify your Raspberry Pi Model, RAM Size and OS/Distro (2023)

There are over 12 variations of the Raspberry Pi - each with their own configuration of ports, RAM sizes and features. On top of this, every owner can then install a different operating system of choice onto their Pi.

This blog will show you how to identify any Raspberry Pi, check the Pi's specs and see what operating system your Pi is running.

Table of Contents

  1. Which Raspberry Pi model do you have?
  2. How much RAM does your Raspberry Pi have?
  3. Which OS is my Raspberry Pi running?

How to tell which model of Raspberry Pi you have?

To check which model of Raspberry Pi you have, you can run this 1 simple command:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Raspberry Pi - cpuinfo command

You can now take a look at the revision number and check it against the following table, updated here.

RevisionModelRAM Size
axx04x2 Model B1 GB
900021A+512 MB
900032B+512 MB
90009xZero512 MB
9000c1Zero W512 MB
ax20823 Model B1 GB
a020a0Compute Module 31 GB
a020d33 Model B+1 GB
9020e03 Model A+512 MB
a02100Compute Module 3+1 GB
x0311x4 Model B1-8 GB
902120Zero 2 W512 MB

If your revision number isn't in the above table: take a look here.

How to check how much RAM (memory) your Raspberry Pi has?

To check how much RAM your Raspberry Pi has, you can try 1 of the 2 options.

1. CPU Info

If you follow the above step to find out which Raspberry Pi you have, you can follow this link to elinux.org to find out how much RAM that specific Raspberry Pi Model has.

2. Free Command

To see how much RAM you have have, how much RAM you have used and how much is available on your Raspberry Pi, you can use this simple command:

free -h

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          7.7Gi       205Mi       6.2Gi       163Mi       1.3Gi       7.1Gi
Swap:          99Mi          0B        99Mi

This command will show you the total amount of RAM, the amount of RAM that is used and the amount that is free.

Identify which OS/Distro your Pi is running?

To know which Raspberry Pi you have, you can use one of these 2 methods.

1. Standard Base Release Command

To see which Operating System our Raspberry Pi is running, we can run the following Linux Standard Base Command.

lsb_release -a

Linux Standard Base Release Command

Ad we can see, this Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian 9.13.

2. Cat Release Information

As an alternative approach to see which Linux Distribution our Raspberry Pi is running, we can run this cat command:

cat /etc/*-release

Which Raspberry Pi OS are you running?

This shows us that we're running Raspbian Stretch 9.