As discussed in yesterday's call, I did some testing against Pegasus and sfcb regarding the necessity of this patch. Neither Pegasus nor sfcb implement that strict input parameter checking on association calls, as it is needed. Requests that do not fulfill the client's requested result set (assocClass, role, resultRole) compared to the association definition (mof) are not filterer out. They are also handed over to the provider. An example: association ElemenentConformsToProfile Xen_RegisteredProfile is ConformantStandard for Xen_ElemenentConformsToProfile KVM_RegisteredProfile is ConformantStandard for KVM_ElemenentConformsToProfile A client request with "assocClass" Xen_ElemenentConformsToProfile and an object path of a KVM_RegisteredProfile is in regard to the mof definition a wrong request. But this request is handed over to the provider, as neither Pegasus nor sfcb does the performance-consuming check if the given object path does fulfill the mof definition. This logic is handed over to the provider code. The std_association library is already prepared for this requirement and partly implements it. The only step that needs to be done in the provider is offering the correct "configuration" to the std_association logic - which is done by this patch now (and I also saw this in some other association providers, e.g. HostedDependency). So yes, this patch duplicates information that was already given in the mof and we could definitely enhance std_association to generically retrieve the class definition from the CIMOM. The behavior seen from the client would be the same. But this minor suggested configuration step uses already existing code by the best performance. So I recommend to apply this patch. -- Regards Heidi Eckhart Software Engineer Linux Technology Center - Open Hypervisor heidieck@linux.vnet.ibm.com ************************************************** IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter Geschaeftsfuehrung: Herbert Kircher Sitz der Gesellschaft: Boeblingen Registergericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 243294