Re: [Freeipmi-devel] Retrieving BIOS information via IPMI

[Al Chu]

Hi Vinny,

The IPMI specification does not support the ability to retrieve/modify
BIOS options per se.  The IPMI specification does allow modification of
various motherboard parameters, many of which may happen to be
readable/modifiable/managed by the BIOS.

So if you are looking to use IPMI for querying the BIOS, it really
depends on what you would like to query.  Not everything in the BIOS
will be queryable.

For example, the chassis subsection of IPMI allows the configuration of
a number of boot options.  Many of these configuration options are
likely in the BIOS (see ipmi-chassis-config tool to get an idea of what
is configurable).  General device information is available through
various device queries and that may also be in the BIOS (see bmc-info
tool for examples of info that is available).  I believe some vendors
support reading of the SEL in the BIOS for hardware analysis (see tool
ipmi-sel for example).

As an aside, various vendors have added extensions to IPMI to
retrieve/set BIOS settings, but these are on a vendor by vendor (many
times motherboard by motherboard) basis.  If you look through the tool
ipmi-oem, you can see what some vendors have supported.

If one of the tools supports what you would like to do, then we can
perhaps dig into the API from that point.

Al


On Mon, 2014-01-06 at 10:20 -0500, Vinny Vallarine wrote:
> My company is looking for an IPMI package that we can interface with.
> I’ve just downloaded your freeIPMI package.  What we need to do is
> query multiple machines and retrieve their BIOS revision numbers as
> well as specific BIOS settings.  I’ve looked through your
> documentation but don’t see an API that would allow me to do that via
> your libraries.  Could you let me know how this can be done through
> your libraries?  I’m looking for the interface/methods that I can call
> to accomplish this.
> 
>  
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Vincent Vallarine
> 
> Innovative Defense Technologies, LLC
> 
> 401.741.4571 (Mobile)
> 
> address@hidden
> 
> www.idtus.com
> 
>  
> 
> 
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-- 
Albert Chu
address@hidden
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory