Sorry about replying to myself...
On 06/10/13 22:43, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
It's not a design purity argument, just what's cheaper.
You probably consider SMBIOS/ACPI table generation "guest code" that has no place in the machine emulator. You're likely willing to expose the needed bits on a case-by-case basis, in their barest representation.
I must consider the entire stack, from the libvirt top, down to the guest kernel or root shell, and see where it is cheapest to effect changes. The higher I can hoist something the better.
Modulo, it depends on what element of the stack people think of as central / indispensable -- that element should support the feature directly.
(Returning to my earlier example, it would be theoretically viable *I guess* to equip libvirt to pre-format a Type 3 SMBIOS blob in a file, and pass it with "-smbios file=...", but many people don't use libvirt. It also might not apply to other emulators supported by libvirt.)
Thanks, Laszlo