"You know you're living in a cutthroat world when your BIOS lies
to your operating system at boot time. Yet that's exactly what
often happens, to one degree or another, depending on the
manufacturer and model of the system. Some of the BIOS lies cause
problems for Linux and some don't. The dmidecode project provides
the means to learn exactly what claims your BIOS is making about
your hardware. Strange as it might seem, it's useful information,
even when it's not 100% reliable.
"According to the project home page, dmidecode's purpose is to
report "information about your system's hardware as described in
your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard..."
