dmidecode

Dmidecode reports information about your system's hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard (see a sample output). This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB).

DMI data can be used to enable or disable specific portions of kernel code depending on the specific hardware. Thus, one use of dmidecode is for kernel developers to detect system "signatures" and add them to the kernel source code when needed.

Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly trusted. Dmidecode does not scan your hardware, it only reports what the BIOS told it to.

Dmidecode was first written by Alan Cox, then was further developed and for a long time maintained by Jean Delvare, and is now maintained by Anton Arapov. It is released under the General Public License (GPL). For more details, you should have a look at the AUTHORS and LICENSE files that come with the source code.

Three additional tools come with dmidecode:

• biosdecode prints all BIOS related information it can find (see a sample output);
• ownership retrieves the "ownership tag" that can be set on Compaq computers;
• vpddecode prints the "vital product data" information that can be found in almost all IBM computers (see a sample output).