On 03/06/14 17:09, Gabriel L. Somlo wrote: > On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 10:03:32AM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: >> >> You don't need to worry about live migration, but the smbios stuff >> clearly goes into the guest-visible change category. >> >> smbios_type1_defaults is one of the compatibility controls. It is false >> for 1.7 (+older) machine types and true otherwise. So when mucking with >> it we need to be careful to not break the compatibility stuff. >> >> So, if we manage to get the patches into shape in time for qemu 2.0 your >> way to do that is fine. We are pretty close to the 2.0 freeze though, >> so maybe we should better plan for post-2.0 anyway, especially as you >> plan to add more tables. > > Well, the only other type I'm personally interested in is 17 (memory > device), because SeaBIOS doesn't build its smbios-v2.3 fields, even > though it advertises v2.4 in its entry point data structure. And OS X > is calling us out on that bluff... :) > > > Type 2 (base board) is required during boot by OS X 10.7 and 10.8 > (strangely though, not by 10.6 or 10.9). But if it were only about > Type 2, I'd probably have left it at passing the binary table in via > the command line :) > > > What really convinced me to go for all this additional work was > Laszlo's suggestion that this might help if/when we try to start > trying to use UEFI/tianocore/ovmf instead of SeaBIOS.
Let me be a bit more precise... :) Moving SMBIOS generation from SeaBIOS to qemu (similarly to ACPI) would benefit: - SeaBIOS (IIRC Kevin had implied his preference for this), - OVMF (no need to play catch-up field-wise), - other boot firmware. I think I didn't suggest using OVMF *instead of* SeaBIOS. :) In any case, I think if you can pull of this migration of SMBIOS tables, that would be a huge service to the community. I should have reviewed your series but it seemed hard, and I didn't have to "look very far" for other work :), so I postponed it. Then Gerd said "please split it up into smaller patches", which I can only agree with! :) Thanks! Laszlo
