Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 0/3]: Add UUID command-line option

[Chris Lalancette]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> I'd really welcome addition of SMBIOS support too - for x86 the UUID
> in the SMBIOS tables, is the most effective way for a guest admin to
> find their machine identify in a format that can be correlated with
> the host machine by external admin tools. Xen has code for doing SMBIOS
> tables that could be useful to anyone wanting to work on this. Though it
> won't be a straight port since they integrate it with the HVM loader
> firmware, the general data table setup code ought to be reusable, only
> leaving the BIOS integration part.

Again, just to be clear; SMBIOS support is already there today in Bochs BIOS
(you can see this by doing "dmidecode" inside a guest).  The only real thing
this patchset was changing was plumbing it through to get the UUID from the Qemu
device model through the VMware back door.  Since there seems to be aversion to
the VMware back door, however, the only real question is how we pass UUID
information from the Qemu device model through to the Boch BIOS, so it can place
the UUID in the SMBIOS tables that it is already building.  Suggestions so far
have been:

1)  Patch the UUID directly into the Bochs BIOS when the Qemu process is loading
it.  This is pretty straightforward, but not very extensible.
2)  Find or come up with a "standard" backdoor mechanism.  I would think this
would be quite similar to the VMware one, but wouldn't be subject to VMware's
whims on it.

Chris Lalancette