Re: [PATCH v2 0/8] SMBIOS improvements

[Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>]

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On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 01:05:21PM -0700, Raymond Mao wrote:

> Motivations for changes:
> Current SMBIOS library and command-line tool is not fully matching with
> the requirements:
> 1. Missing support for other mandatory types (#7, #9, #16, #17, #19).
> 2. Only a few platforms support SMBIOS node from the device tree.
> 3. Values of some fields are hardcoded in the library other than fetching
>    from the device hardware.
> 4. Embedded data with dynamic length is not supported (E.g. Contained
>    Object Handles in Type #2 and Contained Elements in Type #3)
> 
> Changes:
> 1. Refactor the SMBIOS library and command-line tool to better align with
>    the SMBIOS spec.
> 2. Create an arch-specific driver for all aarch64-based platforms to fetch
>    SMBIOS private data from the device hardware (processor and cache).
> 3. Create a sysinfo driver to poppulate platform SMBIOS private data.
> 4. Add generic SMBIOS DTS file for arm64 platforms for those common strings
>    and values which cannot be retrieved from the system registers.
>    Vendors can create their own SMBIOS node using this as an example.
>    For those boards without SMBIOS nodes, this DTS file can be included to
>    have a generic SMBIOS information of the system.
> 5. Add support for Type #7 (Cache Information) and link its handles to
>    Type #4.
> 
> Once this patch is acceptted, subsequent patch sets will add other missing
> types (#9, #16, #17, #19).
> 
> Tests:
> To test this with QEMU arm64, please follow the guide on dt_qemu.rst to
> get a merged DT to run with.
> ```
> qemu-system-arm -machine virt -machine dumpdtb=qemu.dtb
> cat  <(dtc -I dtb qemu.dtb) <(dtc -I dtb ./dts/dt.dtb | grep -v /dts-v1/) \
>   | dtc - -o merged.dtb
> qemu-system-arm -machine virt -nographic -bios u-boot.bin -dtb merged.dtb
> ```
> 
> Known issues:
> It hits the image size limitation on R-CAR board(rcar3_salvator-x).
> ```
> u-boot.img exceeds file size limit:
>   limit:  0x100000 bytes
>   actual: 0x10049d bytes
>   excess: 0x49d bytes
> ```
> This board needs a clean-up to reserve spaces for the changes as SMBIOS
> is a fundamental feature.
> 
> Below is the breakdown of the size-growth of the related functions:
>   function                                   old     new   delta
>     static.smbios_write_type4                  252    1052    +800
>     static.smbios_write_type7                    -     764    +764
>     static.smbios_write_type3                  188     488    +300
>     smbios_get_val_si                            -     128    +128
>     static.smbios_write_type2                  316     376     +60
>     sysinfo_get_data                             -      56     +56
>     static.smbios_write_type1                  380     396     +16
>     smbios_write_funcs                         112     128     +16
>     ofnode_read_u32                              -      12     +12
>     sysinfo_rcar_ops                            40      48      +8
>     install_smbios_table                       468     472      +4

Right, so here's the problem I see right now. About 70% of all U-Boot
platforms enable GENERATE_SMBIOS_TABLE and so "smbios: Refactor smbios
library" causes a growth of around 1.5 kilobytes. That's a problem.
There is a place where we're going to generate as full and complete a
table as we can, and a place where we just want maybe the basics. We
need to re-factor things first so that the platforms which aren't doing
detailed tables do not grow and perhaps even shrink because we can pull
existing code out.

-- 
Tom

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