Libsmbios Library Documentation
- 2006-01-17 Released version 0.11.1
- small fix for dellBiosUpdate version comparison, off by one
- 2006-01-17 Released version 0.11.0
- dellBiosUpdate command line parsing improvements
- spec adherence for bios version comparisons A > X > P > T
- Updated C++ API. moved several member functions out-of-line
- firmware-tools now has its own source tarball and RPMS and is now separately versioned.
- 2005-10-20 Released version 0.10.6
- 2005-10-19 Released version 0.10.5
- 2005-09-28 Released version 0.10.4
- 2005-09-06 Released version 0.10.3
- 2005-09-06 Released version 0.10.2
- 2005-09-06 Released version 0.10.1
- 2005-09-03 Released version 0.10.0
- 2005-08-05 Released version 0.9.2
- 2005-07-28 Released version 0.9.1
- 2005-06-21 Released version 0.9.0 -- First open source release!
- 2005-06-21 Publicly available mailing list: http://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/libsmbios-devel
- see old news page for release details for each release: Old news items
The libsmbios project aims towards providing access to as much BIOS information as possible. It does this by providing a library of functions that can be used as well as sample binaries.
SMBIOS is a standards-based approach for hardware vendors to present and structure management data for consumption by OS and Management Applications. You can find more information here: http://www.dmtf.org/standards/smbios .
Basically, the system BIOS leaves a small table in memory that can be found by the OS after system boot. This table has a standardized format that can easily be parsed by application software.
Several Dell-specific hardware features, such as BIOS update, CMOS Tokens, SMI, hardware probes (temperature, fan, etc) are represented in the SMBIOS tables. Because of this, libsmbios has code to enable these features on Dell systems.
- Best-practice design principles
- Best-practice code sharing
- Extensible Access to SMBIOS Information
- Ability to perform unit tests across multiple systems without using physical hardware
- Centralized, data-driven exception handling for broken BIOS tables
To start out with, the focus is on the SMBIOS tables. In the future, we will provide $PIR, MPTABLE, RCI, RBU, and other tables as well.
Currently, full access to the SMBIOS table and its items is implemented.
Additionally, access and manipulation of Dell Indexed IO Token (type 0xD4) is implemented. This token is a vendor-extention SMBIOS structure which allows uniform access to manipulate the system CMOS to enable, disable, or otherwise manipulate normal BIOS functions or features. See: What are CMOS Tokens
For more information, please see the Libsmbios Overview.
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