[SeaBIOS] [PATCH v2, Ping] SMBIOS: Upgrade Type17 to v2.3, add Type2

[Gerd Hoffmann]

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