On Mo, 2014-02-17 at 15:33 -0500, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:09:48AM -0500, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:
On Fri, Feb 07, 2014 at 04:37:58PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
Il 06/02/2014 14:38, Gabriel L. Somlo ha scritto:
On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 08:02:25PM -0500, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
Thanks. In general, though, it is preferred to make smbios changes at the QEMU layer. Indeed, going forward, I'd like to see all the smbios stuff moved up to QEMU.
Is there something in these two patches that can't be done in QEMU?
But anyhow, right now QEMU seems to be making relatively minor tweaks to something that's firmly at home in SeaBIOS, which is why I sent my patches to the latter...
Yeah, that's correct. There's really no particular hook in QEMU to do this.
Would it be OK to apply this in SeaBIOS now, so that 1. it can be useful until whenever SMBIOS gets transferred/absorbed into QEMU, and 2. it won't fall through the cracks when that transition happens ?
Unfortunately, if we change the smbios in SeaBIOS, it will show up on all machine types that use the new version of SeaBIOS. We've had issues with this type of change before as various OSes react differently to the change.
Gerd, what's your take on this change?
I think we can do this in qemu, without touching seabios at all. The currently used fw_cfg interface allows to pass both individual fields and complete tables. In practice the individual fields interface is used for type0 and type1 table fields. I think the only way to pass complete tables is 'qemu -smbios file=<pregenerated-blob-here>'.
If seabios finds a table provided by qemu it used it, otherwise it (possibly) generates its own. So we can smoothly switch over to qemu, table-by-table. You can have qemu provide type2+type17 tables, and leave everything else as-is. And when doing it in qemu it is easy to do it for new machine types only.
cheers, Gerd