Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2, Ping] SMBIOS: Upgrade Type17 to v2.3, add Type2

[Kevin O'Connor <kevin@koconnor.net>]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 02:17:29PM -0500, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:
> Sending a patch against QEMU would have definitely been my first
> choice, by a wide margin :) But after studying the hw/i386/smbios.c
> source file in QEMU for a while, I walked away with the impression
> that all it really tries to do is edit a few of the Type 0 and Type 1
> fields, and that the hand-over logic between QEMU and SeaBIOS is not
> ready for prime time yet.

The current mechanism for passing smbios from QEMU to SeaBIOS is
horrible.

> So I sent the patch to SeaBIOS, where it seems to do what I want it to :)
> 
> I could try to hack at the QEMU smbios source file to try to find
> where the problem lies (at least why handover to SeaBIOS doesn't work
> as expected), but I'm not sure providing command line flags for
> inputting each record type individually is a scalable way to move
> forward.

In my opinion, generating the entire smbios table in QEMU and using
the "romfile_loader" mechanism (see seabios src/fw/romfile_loader.c)
would be the preferred solution.  I understand that this is more than
you signed up for.

> Perhaps if there were a DMI/SMBIOS compiler (the reverse action of
> "dmidecode --from-dump", something that would take a text "source"
> table and generate a .bin from it), we could focus on getting the
> "-smbios file=<foo>" bit working correctly, and we could provide
> instructions in the docs on how users can build their own smbios
> tables.
> 
> But I couldn't find anything out there that would "compile" a smbios
> table from some type of human-readable (ascii) form...
> 
> Any thoughts ?
> 
> Thanks,
> --Gabriel
> 
> PS. I tried the patched SeaBIOS (with v2.3 type17 and added type2) on
> XP, Windows7, and Linux, and all of them seemed happy and none of them
> seemed to mind... Just sayin' ;)

Thanks for running tests.  One thing that has bitten us in the past is
OSes re-running license checks and/or popping up "new hardware"
notifications on bios table changes.

-Kevin