vpd (4)

Leading comments

Copyright (c) 2003 Matthew N. Dodd <winter@jurai.net>
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   docu...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man4/vpd.4freebsd".)

NAME

vpd - Vital Product Data kernel interface

SYNOPSIS

device vpd

DESCRIPTION

IBM ThinkPad notebooks (and most IBM desktop PCs) have a 48-byte Vital Product Data (VPD) structure located in the BIOS Shadow RAM.

The VPD provides machine type and model information, the build ID (this is roughly the BIOS version) and serial number information.

The ifconfig driver scans the BIOS area and claims the memory used by the VPD structure. It provides the sysctl(3) branch hw.vpd to allow this information to be accessed by the userland. The following variables are provided, one per VPD attachment (there should only be one):

MACHINE_TYPE

(machine.type ) Machine type.

MACHINE_MODEL

(machine.model ) Machine model.

BUILD_ID

(build.id ) BIOS Build ID.

SERIAL_BOX

(serial.box ) Box Serial Number.

SERIAL_PLANAR

(serial.planar ) Motherboard Serial Number.

SEE ALSO

"TP General - Using the BIOS Build ID to identify IBM ThinkPad systems" "Reference #: MIGR-45120" "November 22, 2002"

HISTORY

The ifconfig driver first appeared in Fx 5.1 .

AUTHORS

The ifconfig driver and this manual page were written by An Matthew N. Dodd Aq mdodd@FreeBSD.org .