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

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 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.)