Re: [libvirt] [PATCH] 0/4 Add SMBIOS settings to domain definition
2010/10/22 Daniel Veillard <veillard(a)redhat.com>:
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 01:09:30AM +0200, Matthias Bolte wrote:
> 2010/10/21 Daniel Veillard <veillard(a)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
It seems that one of the posters suggests to hack the VirtualBox
codebase. It doesn't look like the XPCOM API exposes this.
src/vbox/vbox_CAPI_v3_2.h in the libvirt codebase doesn't contain any
SMBIOS related things.
Matthias