Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 23:44:08 -0800 From: Michael Smith <msmith@freebsd.org> To: "Matthew Emmerton" <matt@gsicomp.on.ca> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, ps@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Reading BIOS from userland Message-ID: <200201270744.g0R7i8r02111@mass.dis.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 27 Jan 2002 02:31:07 EST." <004a01c1a704$974dca50$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca>
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> Is there any easy way to read the contents of a system BIOS from userland? No. Most modern BIOS code is paged, compressed and in some cases encrypted. > bios(9) seems to have some very specific kernel-related BIOS routines, but > nothing generic. I'm trying to write a program that will dump the BIOS > image to stdout so that I can use strings(1) to sniff out version strings > and other textual data on systems that can't be rebooted and/or easily > reached. If this is all that you want, you can just open /dev/mem and read the section between 0xe0000 and 0xfffff, much of this information is in there. A better approach, however, would be to look at the SMIBIOS data. I don't have my old SMIBIOS work handy, but Paul Saab <ps@freebsd.org> hacked it up into something usable and you should ask him (copied) if he would mind passing it on. Regards, Mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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