Desktop management interface
The Desktop Management Interface (DMI) is a standardized procedure for recognizing and managing the components of a computer . From the user's perspective it is essentially a by BIOS made available table can be read from which information about the BIOS, and the system in a standardized way. Before this information was completely unavailable from a standardized source.
history
DMI was the first desktop management standard. It was created by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
Since 1999, OEMs and BIOS manufacturers have had to support the DMI standard in order to receive a Microsoft certificate.
The DMI homepage is a directory of all information about DMI from the specification to tools that support the registration of DMI-certified products. Due to the rapid progress in DMTF technologies such as the Common Information Model (CIM), the DMTF defined an "End of Life" process for the DMI, which expired on March 31, 2005.
definition
DMI is part of the System Management BIOS specification ( SMBIOS ). SMBIOS was created to provide data structures and access methods for storing and querying information about the PC.
DMI is an abstraction layer between the system components and the software that manage them.
application
The Linux kernel has a built-in DMI decoder and certain workarounds are switched on or off based on DMI information. The dmidecode tool is used to read out the complete DMI information .
Fully DMI-compatible PCs can also be monitored from a central management console over the network, but this depends on the supporting protocols, such as SNMP .
See also
Web links
- DMI homepage
- dmidecode for Linux - the page also contains links to the pages of other tools for system information.