Mainboard identification and BIOS dump
alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com
Fri Nov 28 20:28:53 EST 2003
hi ya daniel
assuming that one can uniquely identify a motherboard model...
a) yes ... sometimes that info Asus p4-aaaa is in the bios
but usually not
b) why play with dd if=/dev/mem ....
its easier to save a copy of the output of dmesg on bootups
echo "save some startup info"
dmesg > /etc/rc.d/rc.local.dmesg
- append info from /proc/io proc/cpuinfo /proc/pci
cat /proc/cpuinfo >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local.dmesg
- poke around at that rc.localdmesg file when you wanna
know which mb it might be
- you'd have to make a list of mapping/signatures from
the chipset back to the mb manufacturer and model#
making a kernel that supports all your hardware is the easiest way
to handle the non-homogenous network
On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Daniel Fernandez wrote:
> Hi again,
> We have a fully OS remote installation to recover crashed nodes or
> upgrade them. They're configured and installed through BOOTP, NFS and
> some scripting, but our cluster and workstation machines are not uniform
> at all and some critical configuration and monitoring depends on
> motherboard model.
> BIOS on PC's is found at the last 64 Kb as reported by the "System ROM"
> entry at /proc/iomem:
> 00000000-0009efff : System RAM
> 0009f000-0009ffff : reserved
> 000a0000-000bffff : Video RAM area
> 000c0000-000c7fff : Video ROM
> 000d0000-000d5fff : Extension ROM
> 000f0000-000fffff : System ROM
> 00100000-1fffbfff : System RAM
> 00100000-0023d67d : Kernel code
> 0023d67e-002b8f1f : Kernel data
> We have just done a simply BIOS dump script first, avoiding trouble with
> kernel calls in C language:
> dd if=/dev/mem bs=1048575 count=1 | tail -c 65535 > dumpbios.bin
> Therefore, we just need to parse this "dumpbios.bin" file and check
> against a small database file if a known motherboard string is present.
> I think data strings are put at the same place through different models
> ( supposing same bios manufacturer ), so brute force parsing this file
> won't be needed... anyway this file is damn short.
> Is there any motherboard identifying utility for linux ? We could also
> mess with kernel calls as well but that method should suffice ¿ any
> thoughts ? Thank you in advance.
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