On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 11:23:45AM +0200, Daniel Veillard wrote:
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 09:28:48AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 09:52:51PM +0200, Daniel Veillard wrote:
The SMBIOS data are a standardized set of data structures available in the BIOS area of PCs. Those blocks of data describe things like BIOS version informations, machine vendor, model and identifiers, as well as various parts of the machine capability. On a linux machine running dmidecode allows to dump those informations.
Spec available at the DMTF: http://dmtf.org/standards/smbios
From a virtualization POV, it's mostly the first block describing the BIOS named "type 0" and the second block describing the machine named "type 1" which are of interest. Those data are usually accessed either from the OS or from management application, and being able to override the default setings may be needed for such management.
The suggested XML description follows the logical structure of the data, one top smbios description, with one or more blocks, each containing the entries, the example below gives an idea:
<smbios> <table type="0"> <entry name="Vendor">QEmu/KVM</entry> <entry name="Version">0.13</entry> </table> <table type="1"> <entry name="Manufacturer">Fedora</entry> <entry name="Product">Virt-Manager</entry> <entry name="Version">0.8.2-3.fc14</entry> <entry name="UUID">c7a5fdbdedaf9455926ad65c16db1809</entry> </table> </smbios>
I've never really been a fan of the idea of including SMBios data in the XML because it is an x86 specific concept, which only works with HVM guests & the type=1/2/3 is rather opaque in meaning.
The semantic is well defined it's information available from the BIOS, c.f. the DMTF spec. The we know how to get it from a guest, and it's not dependant on the virtualization layer used, it may or may not support it, but at least the expectation are clear.
I can't help thinking that we should define a set of general metadata tags, and then have a internal mapping of those to SMBIOS fields, in the same way that the <uuid> is automatically mapped to SMBIOS.
eg, define a set of metadata like this:
<metadata> <bios-vendor>SeaBIOS</bios-vendor> <bios-version>0.13</bios-version> <system-manufacturer>Fedora</system-manufacturer> <system-product>KVM</system-product> <system-version>0.8.2</system-version> <system-uuid>c7a5fdbdedaf9455926ad65c16db1809</system-uuid> </metadata>
Okay, but what is the semantic of <system-product> for example ? Does that mean SMBIOS type 1 Product Name or something else left to the appreciation of the driver or of the user ?
And for smbios just indicate what the source of the data is:
<smbios mode="host|emulate"/>
host - copy from host SMBIOS emulate - generic emulator settings + metadata overrides
This would map better to what VMWare is letting you do, and let us expose the metadata through other non-SMBIOS data channels
Your suggestion is far more flexible, but that comes with the trouble that we have to define those metadata semantic, or we don't define their semantic, and it may get messy in the long term.
How about a different variation on the theme. <sysinfo type="smbios"> <section name="bios"> <entry name="Vendor">QEmu/KVM</entry> <entry name="Version">0.13</entry> </section> <section namee="platform"> <entry name="Manufacturer">Fedora</entry> <entry name="Product">Virt-Manager</entry> <entry name="Version">0.8.2-3.fc14</entry> <entry name="UUID">c7a5fdbdedaf9455926ad65c16db1809</entry> </section> </sysinfo> Where the valid section types, and entry names are defined according to the sysinfo type. So with type='smbios', the valid section/entries names would be 100% as per the SMBIOS spec. If we add different sysinfo types, we can define appropriate sections/entries as per the spec for those types. This keeps the strictly defined semantics, while avoiding a schema that is tied to smbios Regards, Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://deltacloud.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|