biosconfig - Summary

This group is not part of the GNU Project.

biosconfig reads or writes fields in the CMOS non-volatile store, most
of which are associated with various functions of the PC Basic
Input/Output System (BIOS).  The fields, their types and value ranges
are specified in a configuration file in the style of GNUstep.  This
format is familiar to users of the WindowMaker window manager or applets
written for it.

It is written in C, assisted with GNU bison and flex.  Currently the
only known working platform is GNU/Linux with the GNU C runtime library,
but the dependencies are small and a port to FreeBSD, for example,
should be easy.

The main intended use is for server farms and clusters that need
identical CMOS configuration on all nodes.  A user would execute
biosconfig on each node via rsh or some cluster remote execution tool
with the same configuration file (NFS mounted or distributed with rdist,
rsync or similar).

biosconfig can:
- show values of all CMOS parameters listed in configuration file
- show value of a single parameter specified on the command line
- enumerate possible named values for a specific parameter
- modify a single parameter specified on the command line
- modify list of parameters taken from a regular file or standard input
- write (and later restore) a binary dump of non-reserved areas in the CMOS
- probe SMBIOS for vendor/release/date information and automatically select
 the corresponding configuration file

The starting point  for this project was lxbios:
www.llnl.gov/linux/lxbios/lxbios.html

we started our own because lxbios is specific to a single BIOS type,
while we work with multiple vendors' motherboards and BIOSes. lxbios
served as a reference for the kind of functionality we wanted (though
now we have more), but no code was copied from lxbios either
mechanically or otherwise.

Registration Date: Tue 24 Feb 2004 11:12:59 PM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
Development Status: 3 - Alpha