Re: [dmidecode] [PATCH v4] update dmidecode to parse Modern Management Controller blocks

[Neil Horman]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2018 at 12:09:26PM +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> Hi Neil,
> 
> On Mon, 13 Aug 2018 12:02:41 -0400, Neil Horman wrote:
> > Starting with version 0x300 the SMBIOS specification defined in more
> 
> 0x300 is an internal representation. SMBIOS specification versions
> should be referred to using their string representation as used on the
> DMTF web site, like 3.0.0.
> 
> By the way, from our previous discussion, the first version for which
> type 42 records can actually be decoded is 3.2.0, not 3.0.0. You have
> adjusted it in the code already, and I think the patch description
> should be updated accordingly, to avoid confusion.
> 
> > detail the contents of the management controller type.  DMTF further
> > reserved values to define the Redfish host interface specification.
> > Update dmidecode to properly parse and present that information
> 
> Missing final dot.
> 
> We still don't have any real-world implementation to test your code, do
> we? The whole thing is way too tricky to commit it without testing and
> hope that it will work. If you crafted a modified DMI table dump file
> for the purpose of testing your code, please save me the work and share
> it with me. If not, I'll do it.
> 
> Don't be afraid by the number of my comments below. Most of them are
> minor things and overall this version of your patch is much better than
> the previous one.
> 
I'll have an updated patch to you shortly.  To answer your question above, yes,
and no.  The system I'm currently testing on (A lenovo, for which I provided you
the SMBIOS dump), is in production now, but has a back level firmware.  They are
expected to have an updated firmware that reports the correct SMBIOS level of
3.0.2, and corrects the errors we've found in their type 42 structure shortly.
On that system the only critical problems I've found are:

1) The fact that it reports SMBIOS version 3.0.0 rather than 3.0.2

2) The fact that its protcol record count is at offset 0x7 rather than 0x6.

3) The protcol count field is incorrect (reports 0x9c rather than 0x1)

If I modify the dmidecode tool to adjust for items 1 and 2, this patch properly
reports all information up to an including the first protocol record, after
which it returns, as the second protocol record exceeds the overall length of
the structure.

So I'm reasonably confident the patch is very close to correct, given that its
allowed us to identify errors in vendors SMBIOS layout.  

While I don't have them yet, I am expecting both an updated firmware for my
current system which will fix items (1) (2) and (3) above, as well as a system
from another vendor that hopefully will have a more robust bmc that allows me to
configure other types of network configurations (ipv vs v4 and dhcp addressing
vs static, etc).  I hope to have those in hand in the next few weeks.

Best
Neil