// vim:expandtab:autoindent:tabstop=4:shiftwidth=4:filetype=txt: /*! \mainpage Libsmbios Library Documentation \section news News - 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: \ref old_news_page \section user User Documentation \li \ref cmdlinetools \li \ref installation \li \ref download \li \ref yum \section bios_upd BIOS Update Information \li \ref bios_hdr \li \ref dellBiosUpdate \li \ref dell_drivers \section dev Developer Information \li \ref compilation_linux \li \ref compilation_win \li \ref unit_test_run \li \ref coding \li \ref TODO \section intro Introduction 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. \subsection what What is SMBIOS? 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. \subsection overview_goals Libsmbios Goals \li Best-practice design principles \li Best-practice code sharing \li Extensible Access to SMBIOS Information \li Ability to perform unit tests across multiple systems \a without \a using \a physical \a hardware \li 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: \ref what_cmos For more information, please see the \ref overview_overview. */ /** \page download Downloading Libsmbios \section download_overview Overview and instructions Documentation on the command line utilities is here: \ref cmdlinetools We recommend that you download and install libsmbios using the yum repository. Information on configuring your machine for this repository is here: \ref yum Instructions on how to compile libsmbios from source is here: \ref compilation \section download_other All libsmbios versions All versions of libsmbios are available here, both older versions, plus new beta versions: \li Libsmbios project download directory */ /** \page cmdlinetools Command-line tools summary \section summary Summary of command-line tools Although libsmbios is primarily developed and targeted to be a library that can be used by other projects, we do maintain several command line tools that can be used. Here is documentation on the supported tools. Note that, where possible, most commands are provided in two versions: one version with an "S" at the end of the name, and one without. Commands that end in "S" are simply statically linked versions of those without an "S". Supported Binaries: - \ref getSystemId - \ref assetTag - \ref serviceTag - \ref propertyTag - \ref dellBiosUpdate Semi-Supported Binaries: - dumpSmbios - Dumps all smbios tables in human-readable format - dumpCmos/dumpCmosS - stateByteCtlS - upBootCtlS - smitest Unsupported Binaries: - activateCmosToken/activateCmosTokenS - isCmosTokenActive/isCmosTokenActiveS - createUnitTestFiles/createUnitTestFilesS - disable_console_redir - validateBios */