Description
dmidecode is a command-line utility that decodes and presents information about the system's hardware components, as described in the system's SMBIOS (System Management BIOS) table. The SMBIOS table contains information about the system's manufacturer, version, serial numbers, and other details.This test case ensures that the dmidecode
package is working as expected. It is designed to verify that dmidecode
can successfully retrieve and display hardware information as per the system's SMBIOS table.
Setup
1. Install the version of Fedora that is to be tested on a bare metal system (note: dmidecode
generally doesn't work on virtual machines as they may not expose an SMBIOS table).
2. Install the dmidecode
package using the command: sudo dnf install dmidecode
.
How to test
- Open a terminal window.
- Run the command
sudo dmidecode
to display all the SMBIOS information. - Run the command
sudo dmidecode -t <type>
to display information about a specific hardware component, where<type>
can be a number, or a keyword like "system", "processor", "memory", etc. - Run the command
sudo dmidecode -s <string>
to display a specific piece of information, where<string>
can be a keyword like "system-serial-number", "bios-version", "processor-version", etc.
Expected Results
- The
dmidecode
command completes without error. - The output of the
dmidecode
command correctly displays detailed information about the hardware components of the system as per the SMBIOS table. - The output of
sudo dmidecode -t <type>
correctly displays information about the specified hardware component type. - The output of
sudo dmidecode -s <string>
correctly displays the specific piece of information requested. - The information displayed matches the actual hardware configuration of the system and is consistent with what is expected based on the system's documentation or labels.
Optional
- Compare the output of
dmidecode
with the output of other system information tools (likelshw
,lscpu
,lsblk
, etc.) and ensure they are consistent. - Test
dmidecode
on systems with different hardware configurations and manufacturers. - Test
dmidecode
on systems with recent and older BIOS versions. - Check for any discrepancies or anomalies in the reported information, and validate whether this is a
dmidecode
issue or an issue with the SMBIOS table itself.