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