[flashrom] read BIOS settings

[Nico Huber]

Hi Adam,

On 14.09.2017 11:43, Adam Makkos wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Can you please tell if flashrom is able to also read bios settings?

that depends, of course, where the settings are stored and that varies
from device to device (modern PCs usually store them in the BIOS flash).
Though, even if they happen to be stored in a flash readable by flash-
rom, it will never decode BIOS settings. Flashrom simply dumps the plain
data and will never understand the storage format of BIOS settings.

> I need to check a lot of linux computers if sata is set to ahci, and pxe
> boot is disabled.
> Can I use flashrom for it?

Only if you know how to decode the data yourself.

If your systems run UEFI firmware and you run your Linux in EFI mode,
you might have better chances to get that information through EFI
services. I don't know about the usual "BIOS" settings, but EFI has
a concept of runtime variables that are readable from the OS, see
e.g. [1].

Hope that helps,
Nico

[1] https://firmware.intel.com/blog/accessing-uefi-variables-linux