Comment 82 for bug 577114

Hi,

I have fooled myself. The proc file indeed just gives some status output. And I didn't open it in a text editor...

On http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/bios/ it is written: "Note you may need to sudo modprobe nvram to make this device available on your linux system, and you can confirm the driver is loaded by the presence of the /proc/driver/nvram file which represents some legacy CMOS parameters." ... "one can copy the settings with the dd if=/dev/nvram of=nvram.saved command. If your other machines have exactly the same BIOS settings then it's trivial to copy them to the other machines with the dd of=/dev/nvram if=nvram.saved command."

To read out the nvram just do this with the /dev/nvram file (not /proc/driver/nvram !):

michael@ideapad:~/nvram$ sudo modprobe nvram
michael@ideapad:~/nvram$ sudo cat /dev/nvram > nvram
michael@ideapad:~/nvram$ ll
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 michael michael 114 2012-10-16 20:47 nvram
michael@ideapad:~/nvram$ less nvram
"nvram" may be a binary file. See it anyway?
michael@ideapad:~/nvram$ hexdump -C nvram
00000000 00 00 00 42 00 a2 03 79 02 00 fc 00 00 74 24 60 |...B...y.....t$`|
00000010 6e 23 20 42 98 47 12 20 30 04 c5 91 7e f9 03 e0 |n# B.G. 0...~...|
00000020 09 3e 00 fc 20 cc cf f9 01 00 00 06 ea e3 30 00 |.>.. .........0.|
00000030 00 60 3b f9 05 94 28 80 ca 06 0a 00 00 00 00 00 |.`;...(.........|
00000040 40 db 16 00 78 0a 92 ff ff 1f b0 00 07 f4 01 06 |@...x...........|
00000050 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
00000060 00 00 db 80 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
*
00000070

Looks better.