vpd(4)

vpd4

Vital product data kernel interface

Usage

device vpd

Overview

IBM ThinkPad notebooks (and most IBM desktop PCs) have a 48-byte Vital Product Data (VPD) structure located in the BIOS Shadow RAM.

The VPD provides machine type and model information, the build ID (this is roughly the BIOS version) and serial number information.

The vpd driver scans the BIOS area and claims the memory used by the VPD structure. It provides the sysctl(3) branch hw.vpd to allow this information to be accessed by the userland. The following variables are provided, one per VPD attachment (there should only be one):

MACHINE_TYPE

(machine.type) Machine type.

MACHINE_MODEL

(machine.model) Machine model.

BUILD_ID

(build.id) BIOS Build ID.

SERIAL_BOX

(serial.box) Box Serial Number.

SERIAL_PLANAR

(serial.planar) Motherboard Serial Number.

Releases

Unchanged in 9 releases since FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE.

  1. 14.0–16.0

History

The vpd driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.1.

Authors

The vpd driver and this manual page were written by Matthew N. Dodd ⟨[email protected]⟩.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.