SMBIOS System Management BIOS

System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) is the premier standard for delivering management information via system firmware. Since its release in 1995, the widely implemented SMBIOS standard has simplified the management of more than two billion client and server systems.

For OS-present, OS-absent, and pre-OS environments, SMBIOS offers motherboard and system vendors a standard format to present management information about their products. By extending the system firmware interface, SMBIOS can be used with management applications that use DMTF’s Common Information Model (CIM)  or another technology, such as SNMP. It eliminates the need for error-prone operations, such as probing system hardware for presence detection.

Originally designed for Intel® processor architecture systems, SMBIOS now includes support for IA-32 (x86), x64 (x86-64, Intel64, AMD64, EM64T), Intel® Itanium® architecture, 32-bit ARM (Aarch32) and 64-bit ARM (Aarch64).

Get Involved

  • Work on the SMBIOS standard takes place in DMTF’s SMBIOS Working Group. Learn more and join DMTF to participate.
  • DMTF welcomes feedback on our standards, but requires that individuals submitting comments first agree to our DMTF Feedback Policy.

DMTF Specifications

DSP # Version Title Date Comments Versions
DSP0134 3.7.0 System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) Reference Specification 21 Jul 2023 Standard View

Historical Documents

DSP # Version Title Date Comments
DSP0130 2.3.2 System Management BIOS Reference Specification Standard
DSP0119 2.3.0 System Management BIOS Reference Specification Standard

Open Source Projects using DMTF SMBIOS Technologies

DMTF technologies are leveraged in numerous third-party open source projects. If you are aware of any additional projects using DMTF technologies that are not included below, please contact us so we can add them to the list.
Open Source Project Description of Tool
Coreboot

Coreboot  is an open-source firmware implementation for x86 and ARM, and includes code to generate the SMBIOS table.
dmidecode

Dmidecode (C) is a command-line utility to view the SMBIOS table. It supports multiple operating systems, including Linux and FreeBSD.
EDK2

EDK2 is the standard development framework for UEFI/PI. It includes code to generate the SMBIOS table, and a table viewer (smbiosview) that can be run from the UEFI shell.
Linux

The Linux kernel contains an SMBIOS decoder and makes the SMBIOS table accessible to programs through the /sys virtual filesystem.
Python dmidecode

Dmidecode (Python) reports information about your system's hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard.