xref: /freebsd/share/man/man4/nvram.4 (revision a7623790fb345e6dc986dfd31df0ace115e6f2e4)
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2.\"Copyright (c) 2010 iXsystems, Inc.
3.\"All rights reserved.
4.\" written by: Xin LI <delphij@FreeBSD.org>
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27.\" $FreeBSD$
28.\"
29.Dd February 8, 2010
30.Dt NVRAM 4
31.Os
32.Sh NAME
33.Nm nvram
34.Nd "non-volatile RAM"
35.Sh SYNOPSIS
36To compile this driver into the kernel,
37place the following line in your
38kernel configuration file:
39.Bd -ragged -offset indent
40.Cd "device nvram"
41.Ed
42.Pp
43Alternatively, to load the driver as a
44module at boot time, place the following line in
45.Xr loader.conf 5 :
46.Bd -literal -offset indent
47nvram_load="YES"
48.Ed
49.Sh DESCRIPTION
50The
51.Nm
52driver provides access to BIOS configuration NVRAM on i386 and amd64
53systems.
54.Pp
55PC motherboard uses a small non-volatile memory to store BIOS settings
56which is usually part of its clock chip and sometimes referred as
57.Dq CMOS SRAM .
58This driver exposes bytes 14 through 128 of the NVRAM, or a total of
59114 bytes, at offset zero of the device file
60.Pa /dev/nvram .
61.Pp
62This driver is useful for cloning machines that shares the same hardware
63configuration and need same BIOS setting tweaks.
64.Sh IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
65The BIOS NVRAM's bytes 16 through 31 are checksummed at byte 32.
66This driver
67.Em does not
68take care for these checksums.
69.Sh EXAMPLES
70Backup existing BIOS NVRAM to
71.Pa nvram.bin :
72.Pp
73.Dl dd if=/dev/nvram of=nvram.bin
74.Pp
75Restore BIOS NVRAM from
76.Pa nvram.bin :
77.Pp
78.Dl dd if=nvram.bin of=/dev/nvram
79.Sh SEE ALSO
80.Xr dd 1
81.Sh HISTORY
82The
83.Nm
84device driver first appeared in
85.Fx 6.4 .
86.Sh AUTHORS
87.An -nosplit
88The
89.Nm
90device driver was written by
91.An Peter Wemm .
92This manual page was written by
93.An Xin LI .
94