Re: [libvirt] [PATCH] 0/4 Add SMBIOS settings to domain definition
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
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/
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http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library http://libvirt.org/