[virt-tools-list] [PATCH 0/2] virtinst: Pass SMBios information to guest

[Cole Robinson]

On 07/14/2016 10:06 AM, Charles Arnold wrote:
> This patchset introduces a command line option to pass smbios information to
> the guest. It adds an smbios mode sub-element to the guest's os element. The
> mode attribute must be specified and is either "emulate" (let the hypervisor
> generate all values), "host" (copy all of Block 0 and Block 1, except for the
> UUID, from the host's SMBIOS values), or "sysinfo" (use the values in the
> sysinfo element). If not specified, the hypervisor default is used.
> 
> If sysinfo is specified in the smbios mode field then an additional sysinfo
> element is added to the guest defining the SMBios information. The sysinfo
> element has a mandatory attribute type of "smbios". The smbios information
> comes as three sub-types, "bios", "system", and "baseBoard" where each of
> these types contains sub-elements .
> 
> Incorrectly supplied entries for the bios, system or baseBoard blocks will be
> ignored without error. Other than uuid validation and date format checking, all
> values are passed as strings to the hypervisor driver.
> 
> Examples:
>     --sysinfo emulate
>     --sysinfo host
>     --sysinfo type=0,vendor=Vendor_Inc.,version=1.2.3-abc,...
>     --sysinfo type=1,manufacturer=System_Corp.,product=codename,...
>     --sysinfo type=2,manufacturer=Baseboard_Corp.,product=codename,...
> 
> 

Thanks for reworking the patches. I see now that you were trying to mirror the
qemu command line -smbios format. Were you just following that as an example,
or do you have a particularly compelling reason for it?

virt-install cli naming should map to libvirt values as much as possible,
(minus the '<entry>' naming which is completely redundant) maybe some day
libvirt will support a non-qemu <sysinfo>, or a non-smbios <sysinfo>, or the
user doesn't know that the syntax is for matching with qemu, etc, so we
shouldn't be tied to qemu syntax.

I pushed some patches upstream that make XML properties like this work
correctly when setting the value:

  bios_vendor = XMLProperty("./bios/entry[@name='vendor']")

So I think SYSInfo should be altered to explicitly track bios_* , system_*,
and baseBoard_* properties, and the --sysinfo command line option should have
bios.*, system.*, and baseboard.* properties to match. That way '--sysinfo
help' introspection works as expected too.

_If_ providing an option for the qemu syntax is important to you we can still
support it, but it needs to be explicit. Maybe something like --sysinfo
qemu-cli='type=1,Manufacturer=X,...'. But it should be an additive thing, not
the main way to interact

Thanks,
Cole