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

Daniel Veillard veillard at redhat.com
Fri Oct 22 13:32:21 UTC 2010


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

but that looks like ad-hoc, the idea of trying to push a complete
SMBios implementation probably doesn't make that much sense, and a
simplified indirect version like Dan suggested might be sufficient
At least we should try to expose reflecthost = "true" at the libvirt
level, for ESX (and QEmu/VBox once we can parse the dmidecode output).

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
daniel at veillard.com  | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/




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