Re: Invalid length provided for SMBIOS data

["Andrew D. Ball" <aball@us.ibm.com>]

I wonder if some of the smbios tables are squashed...  I have [much
to my chagrin] a hard-coded the starting address and size of the 
tables:

/* These constants must agree with the ACPI e820 memory map as defined
   in tools/libxc/xc_hvm_build.c and the address the ROMBIOS pulls the
   SMBIOS entry point from in the smbios_init subroutine.
 */
#define SMBIOS_PHYSICAL_ADDRESS 0x9f000
#define SMBIOS_SIZE_LIMIT 0x800

I'll look at what data I get from a 64-bit domU as soon as I can get to
my VT machine.  You're welcome to futz around as well.  The dmidecode
isn't terribly difficult to read.  I've also written a tool to examine
memory by physical (will be pseudo-physical in this case) address that
I'd be happy to share.

Peace.
Andrew

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 16:48 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 11:15:58AM -0400, Andrew D. Ball wrote:
> > Please post the domU's configuration.  Looks like the type 4 (cpu
> > information) generation is broken.
> 
> Here's the config from my RHEL-3, x86_64  guest
> 
> # Automatically generated xen config file
> name = "rhel3x86_64"
> builder = "hvm"
> memory = "500"
> disk = [ 'file:/xen/rhel3x86_64.img,hda,w', ]
> vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:05:eb:04, bridge=xenbr0', ]
> uuid = "dbc4c892-4b67-bc7a-895a-a6b5f56ff061"
> device_model = "/usr/lib64/xen/bin/qemu-dm"
> kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader"
> vnc=1
> vncunused=1
> apic=1
> acpi=0
> pae=1
> vcpus=4
> serial = "pty" 
> on_reboot   = 'restart'
> on_crash    = 'restart'
> 
> > On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 19:03 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > > I was running some tests of HVM guests on Fedora Core 6, test3 and came
> > > across a potential issue with SMBIOS data. When running dmidecode in the
> > > guest VMs it reports that the actual SMBIOS data size, does not match
> > > the advertised size. eg
> > > 
> > > "Wrong DMI structures length: 439 bytes announced, structures occupy 363 bytes."
> > > 
> > > I've tried this in a variety of guest OS (RHEL-3 32-bit, RHEL-3 64-bit,
> > > RHEL-4 64-bit) all the same results. The host is running FC6 test3, but
> > > the bit of code responsible for constructing the SMBIOS tables is identical
> > > to that on the vanilla xen-unstable.hg  repository. I'm not familiar 
> > > enough with SMBIOS specs / code to determine where the mistake in the
> > > length calculation is though...
> > > 
> > > Is anyone else seeing this length mismatch in HVM guests ?
> > > 
> > > FYI, we're tracking this as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=207501
> > > 
> 
> 
> Dan.