Status Published Latest version 3.1.1
Jan 2017 | Year started 1999 Domain BIOS management | |
Organization Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Related standards | ||
In computing, the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) specification defines data structures (and access methods) that can be used to read information stored in the BIOS of a computer. Circa 1999, it became part of the domain of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). Before this integration, SMBIOS functionality had the name DMIBIOS, since it interacted with Desktop Management Interface (DMI). At approximately the same time Microsoft started to require that OEMs and BIOS vendors support the interface/data-set in order to have Microsoft certification.
Contents
The DMTF released the version 3.0.0 of the specification on February 12, 2015.
Structure types
As of version 2.7.1, the SMBIOS specification defines the following structure types:
From Linux
The Linux kernel contains an SMBIOS decoder, allowing systems administrators to inspect system hardware configuration and to enable or disable certain workarounds for problems with specific systems, based on the provided SMBIOS information.
The userspace command-line utility dmidecode(8) inspects this data. Information provided by this utility typically includes the system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version and asset tag, as well other details of varying level of interest and reliability, depending on the system manufacturer. The information often includes usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (including AGP, PCI and ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (including serial, parallel and USB).
From Microsoft Windows
Microsoft specifies WMI as the preferred mechanism for accessing SMBIOS information from Microsoft Windows.
On Windows systems that support it (XP and later), some SMBIOS information can be viewed with either the WMIC utility with 'BIOS'/'MEMORYCHIP'/'BASEBOARD' and similar parameters, or by looking in the Windows Registry under HKLMHARDWAREDESCRIPTIONSystem
Various software utilities can retrieve raw SMBIOS data, including smbiosw and SMBIOS Peek.
From UEFI
In UEFI, the "SmbiosView" shell application can retrieve the SMBIOS data.