Re: [dmidecode] Fixing "DMI table is broken!" error

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Kevin,

On Thu, 7 Sep 2017 08:54:49 +0300, Kevin Wilson wrote:
> First:
>  zgrep STRICT_DEVMEM /proc/config.gz
> gzip: /proc/config.gz: No such file or directory
> 
> And also:
> ls -al /proc/config.gz
> ls: cannot access /proc/config.gz: No such file or director

I naively thought all distribution kernels had CONFIG_IKCONFIG_PROC=y,
but I was wrong.

> But:
> cat /boot/config-4.4.0-31-generic | grep STRICT_DEVMEM
> CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM=y

You found it, but it turns out not to be the issue in the end anyway.

> And the kernel I use is the one who came with Ubuntu, 14.04.5 LTS
> , without any changes.

From the dump you sent to me, it appears that the DMI table is present
and readable (so not a /dev/mem access problem as I originally
suspectes), but the very beginning of the table is corrupted. Hard to
tell for sure but I think the first 9 bytes have been overwritten by.
As there is no indexing on DMI tables, this prevents us from parsing
the whole table.

I remember seeing a similar case, already on a Fujitsu server. The
problem was a conflict with the ACPI Platform Error Interface (APEI)
mechanism, as APEI was configured to make use of the same memory area
where the DMI table was mapped.

Can you try booting with "erst_disable" added to the bootloader
command line to see is that makes the problem go away? (ERST is one
of the APEI components.)

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support