Q: I have several (about 45) Linux servers in our production environment.  I was asked by our security team to provide information on the version of BIOS I am running.  Is there an easy way to find this information on Red Hat Linux?

A: Although this is more of a hardware question than a Linux question, I do have some input that may help.

There is a command I use to inventory my servers hardware that can show bios information.  It is called dmidecode.  The dmidecode command can easily find your bios information and a lot of other useful hardware information.

Simply run the following command and it should give you some good information about your BIOS.

NOTE: You will need elevated privileges (root or sudo) to run these commands.

dmidecode --type bios

Example output:

# dmidecode --type bios
# dmidecode 2.12
SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes
BIOS Information
    Vendor: Dell Inc.
    Version: A03
    Release Date: 05/24/2011
    Address: 0xF0000
    Runtime Size: 64 kB
    ROM Size: 2048 kB
    Characteristics:
        PCI is supported
        BIOS is upgradeable
        BIOS shadowing is allowed
        Boot from CD is supported
        Selectable boot is supported
        EDD is supported
        5.25"/1.2 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
        3.5"/720 kB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
        3.5"/2.88 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
        Print screen service is supported (int 5h)
        8042 keyboard services are supported (int 9h)
        Serial services are supported (int 14h)
        Printer services are supported (int 17h)
        ACPI is supported
        BIOS boot specification is supported
        Targeted content distribution is supported
    BIOS Revision: 4.6Handle 0x003E, DMI type 13, 22 bytes
BIOS Language Information
    Language Description Format: Long
    Installable Languages: 1
        en|US|iso8859-1
    Currently Installed Language: en|US|iso8859-1

The dmidecode command should be installed by default on most modern Linux distros. If not you can easily install it using the following commands.

RPM based distros (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, etc.):

sudo yum -y install dmidecode

or

sudo dnf -y install dmidecode

APT based distros (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.)

sudo apt-get install dmidecode