How to check the BIOS version or name in Linux through a command prompt?

Question

I want to retrieve the current BIOS version and name while working on the terminal.

What could be the commands to find it?

Voting to reopen, it's useful. – Ciro Santilli新疆棉花TRUMP BAN BAD Dec 20 '18 at 18:39 — Ciro Santilli新疆棉花TRUMP BAN BAD, Dec 20 '18 at 18:39

Jonathon Reinhart · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-06T22:31:16.320

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BIOS version is exposed through the SMBIOS tables. On Linux, we can access this with dmidecode (which requires root privileges to run).

To show only BIOS information, use -t bios to specify that we only want to see entries of the type BIOS, and -q to silence unnecessary output.

# dmidecode -t bios -q
BIOS Information
        Vendor: Phoenix Technologies LTD
        Version: 6.00
        Release Date: 02/22/2012
        Address: 0xE72C0
        Runtime Size: 101696 bytes
        ROM Size: 64 kB
        Characteristics:
                ISA is supported
                PCI is supported
                ...
        BIOS Revision: 4.6
        Firmware Revision: 0.0

To get just the BIOS version information, use -s to specify certain strings:

# dmidecode -s bios-vendor
Phoenix Technologies LTD
# dmidecode -s bios-version
6.00
# dmidecode -s bios-release-date
02/22/2012

edited Jan 06 '18 at 22:31

answered Dec 16 '13 at 06:25

Jonathon Reinhart

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-bash: dmidecode: command not found – CuriousCase Dec 17 '13 at 08:03
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Try installing it with `sudo yum install dmidecode` or `apt-get install dmidecode`. – Jonathon Reinhart Sep 13 '14 at 19:34
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@CiroSantilli六四事件法轮功纳米比亚威视 That is why my prompts start with a `#` though - to indicate that I was running as `root`. – Jonathon Reinhart Aug 25 '15 at 15:02
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That's just a convention. Explicitly saying so would save at least one full second to lots of people reading this answer. :) – Nobody Jan 06 '18 at 16:57

score 26 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 08 '18 at 12:47

26

You can also cat /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_version without having to run dmidecode as root.

/sys/class/dmi/id contains also other interesting files:

bios_date
bios_vendor
bios_version
product_family
product_name
product_serial
product_version

A quick overview of them all can be obtained with

head /sys/class/dmi/id/*

(I use head because it prints the name of the file above the first few lines of the file contents.)

answered Jan 08 '18 at 12:47

Marius Gedminas

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I like this answer because nothing need be installed to use it. – Thomas Kammeyer Jan 24 '18 at 18:27
You will get errors with this approach like "head: error reading '/sys/class/dmi/id/subsystem': Is a directory" – user894319twitter May 08 '20 at 03:32
No problem with other motherboard... – user894319twitter Dec 31 '20 at 12:26

Tharanga Abeyseela · Answer 3 · 2013-12-16T06:27:00.233

2

you can use dmidecode. dmidecode support following operating systems

Linux i386, x86-64, ia64
FreeBSD i386, amd64
NetBSD i386, amd64
OpenBSD i386, amd64
BeOS i386
Cygwin i386
Solaris x86
Haiku i586

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

edited Dec 16 '13 at 06:27

answered Dec 16 '13 at 06:21

Tharanga Abeyseela

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 16 '13 at 06:23

1

try this

usage: dmidecode | less

answered Dec 16 '13 at 06:23

Specode

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error: -bash: dmidecode: command not found – CuriousCase Dec 17 '13 at 08:04
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@UditMishra What is your linux distr? If ubuntu run `apt-get install dmidecode` in terminal. – Specode Dec 18 '13 at 06:02
i am getting the following error with this command. . Scanning /dev/mem for entry point. ttyS1 # No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry. – user3860949 Mar 05 '20 at 10:50

How to check the BIOS version or name in Linux through a command prompt?

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