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 -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://deltacloud.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| -- libvir-list mailing list libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list