Oh dear, the search is over. I’m using FAI (http://fai-project.org/) for automatic installation of Linux Mint on the companys Developer Notebooks. The setup is working fine for older Notebooks, which do not have UEFI, the new ones starting to roll in are all equipped with it, so I was searching for a way to detect this in my scripts to perform the specific tasks needed for those devices.
Long story short, after some time googling around and endless threads with “boot into your BIOS” or “read your manual” I’ve found holy grail - dmidecode.
From the man page we know “dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a description of the system’s hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision”.
And now, here it is:
# dmidecode | grep UEFI
UEFI is supported
dmidecode does not only give us information about the BIOS, it also includes information about the Type of the Vendor, Product Number, serial number etc. of the notebook.