[Fedora-xen] [BUG] dmidecode in DomU throws thousands of xen printk's

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 11:40:34PM -0700, Matt C wrote:
> System is kernel-xen-2.6.17-1.2157_FC5 on a 2p opteron (older 
> non-hardware-virt). This happens when I try to run the 'dmidecode' tool 
> from within a non-privileged guest. The guest is running the same kernel 
> as above. One other note is that the console on this system is serial, 
> ttyS0 at 9600bps... which may have something to do with the CPU lockup 
> bugs below.

[snip] 

> I saw some patches on the xen-devel list about adding real smbios data to 
> the HVM virtual hosts, but it seemed to be very HVM-specific code, and I'm 
> running paravirts. The thread from that is here:
> http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-07/msg00416.html

Indeed, thre is no SMBios data made available to ParaVirt guests so it is
not currently possible to make dmidecide work for PV guests. This may change
in the future, but I don't think anyone is actively working on SMBios support
for PV just yet.

> I'd be happy if dmidecode just returned nothing but the console didn't 
> spew messages like this. As you can imagine, the whole system (all virts) 
> is unuseable while this is happening, and it runs for minutes at a time.

Best to file a bug report about this denial of service in bugzilla.

Regards,
Dan.
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