Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2 (RFC)] QEMU: SMBIOS: Build full smbios tables

[Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>]

On 03/06/14 17:09, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 10:03:32AM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>
>> You don't need to worry about live migration, but the smbios stuff
>> clearly goes into the guest-visible change category.
>>
>> smbios_type1_defaults is one of the compatibility controls.  It is false
>> for 1.7 (+older) machine types and true otherwise.  So when mucking with
>> it we need to be careful to not break the compatibility stuff.
>>
>> So, if we manage to get the patches into shape in time for qemu 2.0 your
>> way to do that is fine.  We are pretty close to the 2.0 freeze though,
>> so maybe we should better plan for post-2.0 anyway, especially as you
>> plan to add more tables.
> 
> Well, the only other type I'm personally interested in is 17 (memory
> device), because SeaBIOS doesn't build its smbios-v2.3 fields, even
> though it advertises v2.4 in its entry point data structure. And OS X
> is calling us out on that bluff... :)
> 
> 
> Type 2 (base board) is required during boot by OS X 10.7 and 10.8
> (strangely though, not by 10.6 or 10.9). But if it were only about
> Type 2, I'd probably have left it at passing the binary table in via
> the command line :)
> 
> 
> What really convinced me to go for all this additional work was
> Laszlo's suggestion that this might help if/when we try to start
> trying to use UEFI/tianocore/ovmf instead of SeaBIOS.

Let me be a bit more precise... :)

Moving SMBIOS generation from SeaBIOS to qemu (similarly to ACPI) would
benefit:
- SeaBIOS (IIRC Kevin had implied his preference for this),
- OVMF (no need to play catch-up field-wise),
- other boot firmware.

I think I didn't suggest using OVMF *instead of* SeaBIOS. :)

In any case, I think if you can pull of this migration of SMBIOS tables,
that would be a huge service to the community. I should have reviewed
your series but it seemed hard, and I didn't have to "look very far" for
other work :), so I postponed it. Then Gerd said "please split it up
into smaller patches", which I can only agree with! :)

Thanks!
Laszlo