Viewing SMBIOS data

The SMBIOS specification allows applications and operating systems to retrieve and store hardware configuration settings. Retrieving hardware settings from a shell prompt can be extremely useful, since rebooting to view a given BIOS menu requires the machine to be taken offline. If you happen to be running Solaris 10 or Nevada, you can run the smbios utility to display the contents of the SMBIOS image on a machine:

$ smbios |more

ID    SIZE TYPE
0     60   SMB_TYPE_BIOS (BIOS information)

  Vendor: Sun Microsystems
  Version String: S39_3B17
  Release Date: 07/04/2007
  Address Segment: 0xf000
  ROM Size: 524288 bytes
  Image Size: 65536 bytes
  Characteristics: 0x17f8bde90

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This is good stuff.

matty on November 24, 2007 | Filed Under Solaris Utilities

3 Comments

Shane  on November 24th, 2007

Also note that smbios will return the Chassis Serial number on x86 systems. This has been a life saver when collecting data for systems inventory.

Alex Wilkinson  on December 1st, 2007

dmiencode can be used also:

/usr/ports/sysutils/dmidecode/pkg-descr reads:

Dmidecode is a tool or dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS) table
contents in a human-readable format. The output contains a description of the
system’s hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information
such as serial numbers and BIOS revision.

WWW: http://www.nongnu.org/dmidecode/

Alex  on April 17th, 2009

Whaou this is GREAT ! I was actually looking for a way of getting this kind of hardware details (prtconf / prtdiag kinda suck for that).

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