Fujitsu PRIMERGY: How to check BIOS Version through IPMI

This is related to the previous post (How to check iRMC Firmware Version through IPMI). In this post, I explain how to check the BIOS version via IPMI.

If you are in the OS, you can easily get the BIOS version information by a command like dmidecode.

$ dmidecode -t0 |grep Version
        Version: V5.0.0.12 R1.42.0 for D3384-A1x

Remotely, you can use SSH or PowerShell to get the BIOS version, but this requires a running OS on the remote machine, so using iRMC to get the BIOS version is good when an OS is not running or an OS is not yet installed.

To retrieve the BIOS version via IPMI, you can use the "0x2e 0xe0 0x80 0x28 0x00 0x01 0x00 0x02 0x02" command. Below is an example from RX2540 M4.

$ ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.10.10 -U admin -P admin raw 0x2e 0xe0 0x80 0x28 0x00 0x01 0x00 0x02 0x02 |tr '\n' ' '
 80 28 00 1f 56 35 2e 30 2e 30 2e 31 32 20 52 31
 2e 34 32 2e 30 20 66 6f 72 20 44 33 33 38 34 2d
 41 31 78

The BIOS version string can be decoded from the 5th byte. In the above case, it's "56 35 2e 30 2e 30 2e 31 32 20 52 31 2e 34 32 2e 30 20 66 6f 72 20 44 33 33 38 34 2d 41 31 78". You just need to convert the hex values to ascii characters to see the actual string.

Here is an example.

$ for c in $(ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.10.10 -U admin -P admin raw 0x2e 0xe0 0x80 0x28 0x00 0x01 0x00 0x02 0x02 |tr '\n' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f6-); do echo -n $c |xxd -r -p; done; echo ""
V5.0.0.12 R1.42.0 for D3383-A1x

In the above example, as you can see, the response shows the BIOS version is "V5.0.0.12 R1.42.0 for D3383-A1x".