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Dmidecode reports information about your system's hardware as described in
your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard. This information
typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS
version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of
interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. It will often
include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI,
ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial,
parallel, USB).
DMI data can be used to enable or disable specific portions of kernel code
depending on the specific hardware. Thus, one use of dmidecode is for
kernel developers to detect system "signatures" and add them to the kernel
source code when needed.
Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly
trusted. Dmidecode does not scan your hardware, it only reports what the
BIOS told it to.
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