Vital Product Data (VPD) is a collection of configuration and informational data associated with a particular set of hardware or software. Vital product data (VPD) stores information such as part numbers, serial numbers, and engineering change levels. Not all devices attached to a system will provide VPD, but it is often available from PCI and SCSI devices. Parallel ATA and USB devices also provide similar data, but do not refer to it as VPD.
VPD data is typically burned onto EEPROMs associated with various hardware components, or can be queried through attached I2C buses. It is used by firmware (for example, OpenFirmware) to determine the nature of the system hardware, and to shield the operation of the firmware from minor changes and variations of hardware implementations within a given machine model number.
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“Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building—like Tower Bridge—or a classical front put on a steel frame—like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living—not something added, like sugar on a pill.”
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“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it—all my life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)