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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 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/

Answer 3

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.)