In a day to day system administrative tasks, you may need to find out BIOS version of your servers. In Linux, you can find out the BIOS version without rebooting the server. dmidecodecommand can be used to achieve this.


Command : dmidecode –type 0


[root@testsrv1 ~]# dmidecode –type 0
# dmidecode 2.7
SMBIOS 2.5 present.

Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 20 bytes.
BIOS Information
         Vendor: innotek GmbH
           Version: VirtualBox
          Release Date: 12/01/2006
        Address: 0xE0000
        Runtime Size: 128 kB
        ROM Size: 128 kB
        Characteristics:
                ISA is supported
                PCI is supported
                Boot from CD is supported
                Selectable boot is supported
                8042 keyboard services are supported (int 9h)
                CGA/mono video services are supported (int 10h)
                ACPI is supported


[root@testsrv1 ~]#


In some of the Linux servers, depending upon Hardware model, “–type 0” wont give correct output. In that cases, just use “dmidecode | more” command and find out the information by manually looking out the output.