The SMBIOS Specification addresses how motherboard and system vendors present management information about their products in a standard format by extending the BIOS interface on x86 architecture systems. The information is intended to allow generic instrumentation to deliver this information to management applications that use DMI, CIM or direct access, eliminating the need for error prone operations like probing system hardware for presence detection.

This specification is intended to provide enough information that BIOS developers may implement the necessary extensions to allow the hardware on their products and other system-related information to be accurately determined by users of the defined interfaces. In addition, in cases where the implementer has provided write access to non-volatile storage on the system, some information may be updated by management applications after a system is deployed in the field to record data that persists between system starts.

The specification is also intended to provide enough information for developers of management instrumentation to develop generic routines for translating from SMBIOS format to the format used by their chosen management technology whether it is a DMTF technology like DMI or CIM, or another technology. To support this translation for DMTF technologies, sections of this specification describe the DMI groups and CIM classes intended to convey the information retrieved from an SMBIOS-compatible system through the interfaces described in the document.

The latest revision of the specification includes revisions to the standard to address the evolving hardware architecture, including updates to processor information and device descriptions to reflect current technology.

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