Hi,
However, when I compare unmodified SMBIOS against what I get when supplying the patched binary table via command line, I get this:
As Laszlo already sayed: one table per file.
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.
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.
Agree. qemu should simply autogenerate the entries (where it can). i.e. basically port seabios smbios_init_type_17 function to qemu, then hook the result into the smbios_entries array. The code to do that is in smbios_entry_add(). You probably want to factor that out ino a small helper function which is then called by both smbios_entry_add() and the type17 init function.
cheers, Gerd