On 19.12.2007 01:35, Marc Jones wrote:
Steve Isaacs wrote:
Because of a need to be compatible with other systems I'm seeing a requirement to support SMBIOS tables. I did some quick searching and didn't find much regarding this subject on the LinuxBIOS web site or the source code.
Specifically, the _SM_ pattern (SMMBIOS spec) needs to be embedded along with DMI blocks such as System Information (0x01), Base Board Information (0x02), System Encloser or Chassis (0x03) at a minimum. The commandline utility dumpSmbios (or similar) would be used to retrieve this information.
From an application perspective this is important information. The same
application needs to run on platforms having different BIOSes -- some commercial, some LinuxBIOS. The hardware type and version information is important for maintaining and deploying the application. Because of this, the application needs a consistent mechanism for retrieving the information I listed above.
Any suggestions or alternatives?
I don't think that anyone has implemented SMBIOS for LinuxBIOS since it is a "legacy" BIOS feature and not required to boot Linux. Also, LinuxBIOS doesn't leave any code resident which would be required for SMBIOS. Maybe a payload or a custom driver would be the way to go.
AFAICS Steve is talking about SMBIOS, not SMI. SMBIOS is sort of an asset management helper. With a chassis type, serial number and some information about the base baord you can use management applications to determine where a specific machine is used (generate a list of serial numbers from all machines, look which machine has the wanted serial number). It should be possible to generate the SMBIOS structure in a similar way to how we generate e820 tables.
Regards, Carl-Daniel