biosdecode

Decode and display BIOS data structures

TLDR

Display all BIOS information

$ sudo biosdecode

Read BIOS data from a binary dump file

$ sudo biosdecode --dev-mem [bios.bin]

Display version information

$ biosdecode --version

biosdecode parses the BIOS memory and prints information about all structures it knows of, including SMBIOS (System Management BIOS), DMI (Desktop Management Interface), ACPI, PNP (Plug and Play), BIOS32, PIR (PCI IRQ Routing), and vendor-specific structures (Compaq, IBM, Fujitsu, Sony).For more detailed SMBIOS/DMI output, use dmidecode instead.

PARAMETERS

-d, --dev-mem FILE

Read memory from device FILE instead of default /dev/mem

-V, --version

Display version information and exit

-h, --help

Display help message

INSTALL

sudo apt install dmidecode

sudo dnf install dmidecode

sudo pacman -S dmidecode

sudo apk add dmidecode

sudo zypper install dmidecode

nix profile install nixpkgs#dmidecode

CAVEATS

Requires root privileges to access /dev/mem where BIOS data is stored. On modern Linux systems, dmidecode is preferred as it provides more comprehensive and detailed output. Some systems with restricted memory access may not allow biosdecode to function properly.

HISTORY

biosdecode is part of the dmidecode package, originally written by Alan Cox and maintained by Jean Delvare. It was created to provide a simple tool for extracting BIOS information on Linux systems, predating the more feature-rich dmidecode utility.