Re: [Qemu-devel] [QEMU v6 PATCH 00/17] SMBIOS: build full tables in QEMU

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On Di, 2014-04-15 at 20:47 -0400, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 10:29:26AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > Leave the old interface code basically as-is.  type0 and type1
> > individual fields are passed like they are passed today.  We don't
> > change to to pass full tables, and we don't extend that to new table
> > types.  Continue to provide these in parallel to the new interface, for
> > compatibility with old firmware (and old machine types).
> > 
> > The code to generate complete tables will only be used for
> > "etc/smbios/smbios-tables".  Only machine types for 2.1 + newer will
> > provide them, so with older machine types seabios will continue to
> > generate the smbios tables and guest wouldn't notice a difference.
> 
> This does mean that SeaBIOS would need to continue to support
> generating of smbios tables for the foreseeable future as it would
> need that support whenever one wanted to run a v2.0 or earlier machine
> type.  It would be nice if a future version of SeaBIOS could drop the
> smbios generation code.
> 
> However, I'm okay with either direction.

Same situation as with acpi, where qemu generating the tables is limited
to new machine types too.  So we'll continue to need the acpi/smbios
generation code.  Maintenance burden should be low as there is little
reason to ever touch that code as any new development happens in qemu.
We can add config options to disable it, so it is possible to reduce the
memory footprint in case you know you don't need it.

cheers,
  Gerd