From Fedora Project Wiki

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

  1. Open a terminal window.
  2. Run the command sudo dmidecode to display all the SMBIOS information.
  3. 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.
  4. 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

  1. The dmidecode command completes without error.
  2. The output of the dmidecode command correctly displays detailed information about the hardware components of the system as per the SMBIOS table.
  3. The output of sudo dmidecode -t <type> correctly displays information about the specified hardware component type.
  4. The output of sudo dmidecode -s <string> correctly displays the specific piece of information requested.
  5. 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

  1. Compare the output of dmidecode with the output of other system information tools (like lshw, lscpu, lsblk, etc.) and ensure they are consistent.
  2. Test dmidecode on systems with different hardware configurations and manufacturers.
  3. Test dmidecode on systems with recent and older BIOS versions.
  4. 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.