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

[Gabriel L. Somlo]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:38:04AM -0500, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 04:27:27PM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > On Mi, 2014-02-19 at 15:40 -0500, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote:
> > > So I gave up on that relatively quickly, as there's no easy and
> > > convenient way to "harvest" a binary of just one table type from
> > > a host that works the way I want it... :(
> > 
> > "dmidecode --type 2" ?
> 
> That doesn't work with --dump-bin, to get me something I could just
> load with "-smbios file=<foo>".
> 
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:20:37PM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> > If you want to export a new table whole-sale (SMBIOS_TABLE_ENTRY),
> > then
> > you don't have to modify SeaBIOS. However, in qemu:
> > - you either need to pass single-table blobs on the qemu command
> > line, or
> > - patch qemu so that it internally prepares the *complete* table for
> > the
> > boot firmware (meaning you must encode knowledge about formatted vs.
> > unformatted fields in qemu -- you must set up the unformatted area
> > and
> > the string indices yourself). (*)
> > 
> > You have to encode the formatted vs. unformatted knowledge
> > *somewhere*.
> > You can push it around (qemu command line, qemu code, seabios code),
> > but
> > you have to encode it explicitly somewhere.
> > 
> > (Writing the SMBIOS patches for OVMF (type0 and type1) took me three
> > days of *uninterrupted* misery ^W coding.)
> > 
> > Preferably, (*) should be implemented, because then SeaBIOS and OVMF
> > can
> > both profit immediately. O:-)
> 
> At this point, the question is "cut'n'paste from SeaBIOS" vs. rewrite
> the table generation routines from scratch in QEMU? I remember ACPI
> was mostly cut'n'pasted into QEMU, so would that be an OK starting
> point for SMBIOS as well ? I looked at licenses, and the SeaBIOS
> smbios.c file is gplv3, whereas the current smbios.c in QEMU is some
> combination of gplv2 and gplv2+. Any thoughts on whether that's a
> problem, legally speaking ?

s/gplv3/lgplv3/, but same question :)

Thanks,
--G