From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Jan 26 23:43:59 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mass.dis.org (dhcp45-21.dis.org [216.240.45.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 76FBC37B417; Sat, 26 Jan 2002 23:43:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from mass.dis.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mass.dis.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g0R7i8r02111; Sat, 26 Jan 2002 23:44:08 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from msmith@mass.dis.org) Message-Id: <200201270744.g0R7i8r02111@mass.dis.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001 with nmh-1.0.4 To: "Matthew Emmerton" Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, ps@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Reading BIOS from userland In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 27 Jan 2002 02:31:07 EST." <004a01c1a704$974dca50$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 23:44:08 -0800 From: Michael Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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 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