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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 07:59:36AM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> 
> Is there any interest in this series?  Aside from copying host SMBIOS
> entries, it also seems useful for providing information to the guest
> about their virtual machine pool (perhaps via a type 3 entry), or
> whatever other bits of data someone might find useful (type 11, OEM
> string for instance).  Thanks,
> 
> Alex
> 
> On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 13:05 -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > This series adds a new -smbios option for x86 that allows individual
> > SMBIOS entries to be passed into the guest VM.  This follows the same
> > basic path as the support for loading ACPI tables.  While SMBIOS is
> > independent of ACPI, I chose to add the smbios_entry_add() function to
> > acpi.c because they're both somewhat PC BIOS related (and ia64 can
> > support SMBIOS and might be able to make use of it there).
> > 
> > This feature allows the guest to see certain properties of the host if
> > configured correctly.  For instance, the system model and serial number
> > in the type 1 entry.  Obviously its only built at boot, so doesn't get
> > updated for migration scenarios.  User provided entries will supersede
> > generated entries, so care should be taken when passing entries which
> > describe physical properties, such as memory size and address ranges.
> > Thanks,

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.

Regards,
Daniel
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