From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sat Jan 26 23:56: 4 2002
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Message-ID: <006701c1a708$0f0669a0$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca>
From: "Matthew Emmerton" <matt@gsicomp.on.ca>
To: "Michael Smith" <msmith@freebsd.org>
Cc: <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
References: <200201270744.g0R7i8r02111@mass.dis.org>
Subject: Re: Reading BIOS from userland 
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 02:55:58 -0500
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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.

Duh!  I knew there was a simple way!  This will suffice for my purposes.
Thanks!

--
Matt Emmerton


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