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** INTRODUCTION **
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Dmidecode reports information about your system's hardware as described in
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your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard. This information
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typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS
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version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of
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interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often
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include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI,
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ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial,
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parallel, USB).
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DMI data can be used to enable or disable specific portions of kernel code
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depending on the specific hardware. Thus, one use of dmidecode is for kernel
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developers to detect system "signatures" and add them to the kernel source
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code when needed.
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Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly trusted.
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Dmidecode does not scan your hardware, it only reports what the BIOS told it
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to.
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** INSTALLATION **
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The home web page for dmidecode is hosted on Savannah:
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  http://www.nongnu.org/dmidecode/
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You will find the latest version (including CVS) there, as well as fresh news
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and other interesting material, such as a list of related projects and
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articles.
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This program was first written for Linux, and has since been reported to work
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on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS and Solaris as well.
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There's no configure script, so simply run "make" to build dmidecode, and
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"make install" to install it. You also can use "make uninstall" to remove
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all the files you installed. By default, files are installed in /usr/local
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but you can change this behavior by editing the Makefile file and setting
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prefix to wherever you want. You may change the C compiler and the
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compilation flags as well.
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Optionally, you can run "make strip" prior to "make install" if you want
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smaller binaries. However, be aware that this will prevent any further
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attempt to debug the programs.
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Two parameters can be set in the Makefile file to make dmidecode work on
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non-i386 systems. They should be used if your system uses the big endian
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byte ordering (Motorola) or doesn't support unaligned memory accesses,
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respectively. For example, compiling for a SPARC processor would require
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both (but I am not aware of SPARC-based systems implementing SMBIOS).
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Compiling for an IA64 processor requires the memory alignment workaround,
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and it is enabled automatically.
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** DOCUMENTATION **
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Each tool has a manual page, found in the "man" subdirectory. Manual pages
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are installed by "make install". See these manual pages for command line
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interface details and tool specific information.
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For an history of the changes made to dmidecode, see the NEWS file.
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If you need help, your best chances are to visit the web page (see the
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INSTALLATION section above) or to get in touch with the developers directly.
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Have a look at the AUTHORS file and contact one of the maintainers.
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If you want to help with the development of dmidecode, please consider
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joining the dmidecode-devel discussion list:
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  http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/dmidecode-devel
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** COMMON PROBLEMS **
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IA-64
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Non-Linux systems are not yet supported.
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MMAP
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Note that mmap() is now used by default wherever possible, since this seems
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to solve a number of problems. This default behavior can be changed in
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config.h. Just to make sure this is clear, mmap() is not used for performance
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reasons but to increase the number of systems on which dmidecode can be
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successfully run.
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CYGWIN
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Dmidecode used to work under Cygwin. However the /dev/mem interface was
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removed at some point in time so it no longer works.
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** MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS **
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Three other tools come along with dmidecode: biosdecode, ownership and
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vpddecode. These tools are only useful on systems with a BIOS, so they
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are not built on IA-64 by default.
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BIOSDECODE
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This one prints all BIOS related information it can find in /dev/mem.
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It used to be part of dmidecode itself, but as dmidecode was growing,
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we felt that the non-DMI part had to be moved to a separate tool.
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OWNERSHIP
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This tool was written on a request by Luc Van de Velde for use with Novell
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tools in his company. It retrieves the "ownership tag" that can be set on
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most Compaq computers. Since it uses the same mechanisms dmidecode and
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biosdecode use, and could be of some use for other people as well, we
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decided to make it part of the project.
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VPDDECODE
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This tool prints the contents of the "vital product data" structure as
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found in most IBM and Lenovo computers. It used to have a lookup table
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for the machine name, but it was unreliable and hard to maintain so it
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was ultimately dropped. It has a command line interface.