[Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 0/2] qemu: SMBIOS passing support

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@hp.com>]

On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 17:59 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > I can't help thinking that if we wish to provide metadata to guest OS
> > like system model, serial number, etc, then we'd be better off using
> > explicit named flags (or QEMU config file settings once that exists)
> >
> >   -system-serial 2141241521  -system-model "Some Virtual Machine"
> >
> > and have QEMU generate the neccessary SMBIOS data, or other equivalent 
> > data tables to suit the non-PC based machine types for which SMBIOS
> > is not relevant.
> >   
> 
> -smbios serial=blah,model=bleach ?
> 

Unfortunately that does make them smbios specific, while I think Daniel
is pointing out that several options may be useful on other platforms.

This is basically the same issue we have with -uuid already.  -uuid is a
non-smbios specific option, but rombios will incorporate the data when
it builds the type 1 entry.  I've retained this functionality, so that a
-uuid option will override the uuid in a passed in type 1 entry.  This
could be further extended with separate patches to provide serial or
model numbers generically, but allow them to override smbios values.
This seems complimentary to the patches in this series, but I don't
think it replaces all the functionality we get from a raw smbios entry
interface.  Thanks,

Alex