Q: I have about 70 Linux systems all running various distributions based off of Red Hat (CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat). I have a need to find the BIOS information to document the vendor and version numbers. Is there a way I can do this from the command line without rebooting each system?
A: Using dmidecode you can gather a lot of information about a system, including the BIOS information.
Simply run dmidecode at the command line as root:
[root@bighat ~]# dmidecode
# dmidecode 2.12
SMBIOS 2.5 present.
77 structures occupying 2896 bytes.
Table at 0x000F0700.
Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes
BIOS Information
Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
Version: 1205
Release Date: 09/24/2010
Address: 0xF0000
Runtime Size: 64 kB
ROM Size: 2048 kB
Characteristics:
-- OUTPUT TRUNCATED--
There are also some options that come with dmidecode to allow you to show ONLY the BIOS information:
[root@bighat ~]# dmidecode -t bios
# dmidecode 2.12
SMBIOS 2.5 present.
Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes
BIOS Information
Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
Version: 1205
Release Date: 09/24/2010
Address: 0xF0000
Runtime Size: 64 kB
ROM Size: 2048 kB
Characteristics:
ISA is supported
PCI is supported
PNP is supported
APM is supported
BIOS is upgradeable
BIOS shadowing is allowed
ESCD support is available
Boot from CD is supported
Selectable boot is supported
BIOS ROM is socketed
EDD is supported
5.25″/1.2 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
3.5″/720 kB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
3.5″/2.88 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
Print screen service is supported (int 5h)
8042 keyboard services are supported (int 9h)
Serial services are supported (int 14h)
Printer services are supported (int 17h)
CGA/mono video services are supported (int 10h)
ACPI is supported
USB legacy is supported
LS-120 boot is supported
ATAPI Zip drive boot is supported
BIOS boot specification is supported
Targeted content distribution is supported
BIOS Revision: 8.15
Handle 0x003B, DMI type 13, 22 bytes
BIOS Language Information
Language Description Format: Long
Installable Languages: 6
en|US|iso8859-1
zh|ZH|iso8859-1
de|DE|iso8859-1
cn|CN|iso8859-1
fr|FR|iso8859-1
ja|JP|unicode-1
Currently Installed Language: en|US|iso8859-1
Since you only need the vendor and version, you can then use grep to pull the information you need like so:
[root@bighat ~]# dmidecode -t bios | egrep -i '(vendor|version)'
Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
Version: 1205
Most systems should have dmidecode installed by default, if not simply install it via yum:
yum -y install dmidecode
See the man page for dmidecode for more options. I hope this helps, good luck.