BIOS settings checksum

[Gaetan Lord]

Hi,

Not sure if you can help me on the following, but if I do not ask, I will
not get any answer.

I have to check +- 400 identical systems. I could do the hardware section,
but the only missing pieces is the BIOS setting.

I try flashrom on the board without success, but I think you could help me.

I wonder if there is a way to dump the BIOS settings from the memory to a
file.
I want to do a checksum on the file, and compare with a master system.
That way I do not need to decode the settings, but I guess the checksum will
be different if
I have a different configuration.

Do any of you have an idea, or track I could follow to achieve my goal.

This could be a dos, or linux solution.

Thanks in advance  for any help

[Dave B]

On 25/10/10 15:53, Gaetan Lord wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Not sure if you can help me on the following, but if I do not ask, I 
> will not get any answer.
>
> I have to check +- 400 identical systems. I could do the hardware 
> section, but the only missing pieces is the BIOS setting.
>
> I try flashrom on the board without success, but I think you could 
> help me.
>
> I wonder if there is a way to dump the BIOS settings from the memory 
> to a file.
> I want to do a checksum on the file, and compare with a master system.
> That way I do not need to decode the settings, but I guess the 
> checksum will be different if
> I have a different configuration.
>
> Do any of you have an idea, or track I could follow to achieve my goal.
>
> This could be a dos, or linux solution.
>
> Thanks in advance  for any help

I needed similar and found it on this link:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/bios/

Essentially (on Linux):
sudo modprobe nvram
sudo dd if=/dev/nvram of=dir/nvram-save/2010-10-26

... then md5sum in the same script ?

Dave

[Gaetan Lord]

Dave,

This is good information, and actually answer exactly what I was looking
for.

Stefan from the Coreboot project point me to the nvramtool tool. I did test
it before I post my question, and I have to agree that the only test I did
was the -a switch, and conclude it didn't work. In fact it does work when
using the -b option. It create a 256 bytes file, which I assume is similar
content.

To validate I ran the following from each command
od -Ax -tx1z -v /dev/nvram

and

nvramtool -x

We could see that both have the same 114 bytes pattern produce by /dev/nvram

Thank to all of you, this will save me a lot of time

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 20:41, Dave B  wrote:
> On 25/10/10 15:53, Gaetan Lord wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Not sure if you can help me on the following, but if I do not ask, I will
> not get any answer.
>
> I have to check +- 400 identical systems. I could do the hardware section,
> but the only missing pieces is the BIOS setting.
>
> I try flashrom on the board without success, but I think you could help me.
>
> I wonder if there is a way to dump the BIOS settings from the memory to a
> file.
> I want to do a checksum on the file, and compare with a master system.
> That way I do not need to decode the settings, but I guess the checksum
> will be different if
> I have a different configuration.
>
> Do any of you have an idea, or track I could follow to achieve my goal.
>
> This could be a dos, or linux solution.
>
> Thanks in advance  for any help
>
> I needed similar and found it on this link:
> http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/bios/
>
> Essentially (on Linux):
> sudo modprobe nvram
> sudo dd if=/dev/nvram of=dir/nvram-save/2010-10-26
>
> ... then md5sum in the same script ?
>
> Dave
>
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