NeoSMBIOS

What it is

NeoSMBIOS reads the SMBIOS/DMI tables that firmware exposes (board manufacturer, serial numbers, BIOS version, CPU and memory modules) and hands back typed, bounds-checked views of them. It is a single header released under the MIT License.

It is a pure decoder: it never touches the firmware itself. You give it a std::span<const std::uint8_t>, so the bytes can come from Win32, sysfs, a memory mapping or a capture file. That also means no WMI dependency on Windows, and no OS headers anywhere.

Features

• One header, no dependencies, no allocations: std::span in, std::string_view out.
• Testable without hardware: because nothing is read from the machine, the parser can be unit-tested against captured tables, with no root or administrator rights.
• Version-safe: every field is checked against the record’s own length byte first, so asking an old BIOS for a newer field returns std::nullopt instead of reading past the end.
• No exceptions: std::expected for parsing, std::optional for fields firmware may omit.
• A plain .get_xxx() API for the common structure types, and std::ranges support for walking the table.

Requirements

C++23: GCC 14, Clang 18 or MSVC 19.40 (Visual Studio 2022 17.10) and newer. The header stops the build with a clear error on older standards.