[libvirt] [PATCH] 0/4 Add SMBIOS settings to domain definition

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 09:52:51PM +0200, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>  The SMBIOS data are a standardized set of data structures available
> in the BIOS area of PCs. Those blocks of data describe things like
> BIOS version informations, machine vendor, model and identifiers,
> as well as various parts of the machine capability. On a linux
> machine running dmidecode allows to dump those informations.
> 
>   Spec available at the DMTF: http://dmtf.org/standards/smbios
> 
>   From a virtualization POV, it's mostly the first block describing
> the BIOS named "type 0" and the second block describing the machine
> named "type 1" which are of interest. Those data are usually accessed
> either from the OS or from management application, and being able to
> override the default setings may be needed for such management.
> 
>   The suggested XML description follows the logical structure of the
> data, one top smbios description, with one or more blocks, each
> containing the entries, the example below gives an idea:
> 
>   <smbios>
>     <table type="0">
>       <entry name="Vendor">QEmu/KVM</entry>
>       <entry name="Version">0.13</entry>
>     </table>
>     <table type="1">
>       <entry name="Manufacturer">Fedora</entry>
>       <entry name="Product">Virt-Manager</entry>
>       <entry name="Version">0.8.2-3.fc14</entry>
>       <entry name="UUID">c7a5fdbdedaf9455926ad65c16db1809</entry>
>     </table>
>   </smbios>

I've never really been a fan of the idea of including SMBios
data in the XML because it is an x86 specific concept, which
only works with HVM guests & the type=1/2/3 is rather opaque
in meaning. 

I can't help thinking that we should define a set of general
metadata tags, and then have a internal mapping of those to 
SMBIOS fields, in the same way that the <uuid> is automatically
mapped to SMBIOS.

eg, define a set of metadata like this:

  <metadata>
    <bios-vendor>SeaBIOS</bios-vendor>
    <bios-version>0.13</bios-version>
    <system-manufacturer>Fedora</system-manufacturer>
    <system-product>KVM</system-product>
    <system-version>0.8.2</system-version>
    <system-uuid>c7a5fdbdedaf9455926ad65c16db1809</system-uuid>
  </metadata>

And for smbios just indicate what the source of the data is:

    <smbios mode="host|emulate"/>

  host - copy from host SMBIOS
  emulate - generic emulator settings + metadata overrides

This would map better to what VMWare is letting you do, and let us expose
the metadata through other non-SMBIOS data channels

Regards,
Daniel
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