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

[Matthias Bolte]

2010/10/22 Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat.com>:
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 01:09:30AM +0200, Matthias Bolte wrote:
>> 2010/10/21 Daniel Veillard <veillard at redhat.com>:
>
>> Okay, I looked at what can be done for ESX.
>>
>> Looking at the SMBIOS data from _inside_ a ESX guest using dmidecode I
>> can get this
>>
>>  <smbios>
>>    <table type="0">
>>      <entry name="Vendor">Phoenix Technologies LTD</entry>
>>      <entry name="Version">6.00</entry>
>>    </table>
>>    <table type="1">
>>      <entry name="Manufacturer">VMware Inc.</entry>
>>      <entry name="Product">VMware Virtual Platform</entry>
>>      <entry name="Version">None</entry>
>>      <entry name="Serial">VMware-[domain/uuid]</entry>
>>      <entry name="UUID">[domain/uuid]</entry>
>>    </table>
>>  </smbios>
>>
>> The UUID and Serial are basically the UUID of the guest.
>>
>> Putting smbios.reflecthost = "true" (defaults to false) in the VMX
>> file results in
>>
>>  <smbios>
>>    <table type="0">
>>      <entry name="Vendor">Phoenix Technologies LTD</entry>
>>      <entry name="Version">6.00</entry>
>>    </table>
>>    <table type="1">
>>      <entry name="Manufacturer">LENOVO</entry>
>>      <entry name="Product">7673J3G</entry>
>>      <entry name="Version">None</entry>
>>      <entry name="Serial">VMware-[domain/uuid]</entry>
>>      <entry name="UUID">[domain/uuid]</entry>
>>    </table>
>>  </smbios>
>>
>> So Manufacturer and Product from the type 1 table are now inherited
>> from the SMBIOS of the physical host.
>>
>> But this is all from inside the guest. From _outside_ the guest over
>> the vSphere API I can only access "LENOVO" and "7673J3G", the data of
>> the physical host.
>>
>> To make it even worse, it seems that none of this can be edited in any
>> way (apart from the Serial/UUID because this is the domain UUID).
>>
>> Therefore, I think there is no possible useful implementation for this
>> in the ESX driver, besides outputting static unchangeable data.
>
>  Okay, I looked up for VirtualBox, and apparently there is some support
> for editing some of the BIOS and system entries too based on this post
>  http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=3224

It seems that one of the posters suggests to hack the VirtualBox
codebase. It doesn't look like the XPCOM API exposes this.

src/vbox/vbox_CAPI_v3_2.h in the libvirt codebase doesn't contain any
SMBIOS related things.

Matthias