Re: [PATCH] Add a module for retrieving SMBIOS information

[Prarit Bhargava]

On 02/02/2015 01:01 PM, Rajat Jain wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: David Michael [mailto:address@hidden
>> Sent: Monday, February 02, 2015 9:10 AM
>> To: Prarit Bhargava
>> Cc: The development of GNU GRUB; Andrei Borzenkov; Rajat Jain; Stu
>> Grossman; Raghuraman Thirumalairajan; Sanjay Jain
>> Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add a module for retrieving SMBIOS information
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 6:20 AM, Prarit Bhargava <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>>> On 02/01/2015 09:05 PM, David Michael wrote:
>>>> * grub-core/commands/i386/smbios.c: New file.
>>>> * grub-core/Makefile.core.def (smbios): New module.
>>>> * docs/grub.texi (smbios): New node.
>>>> (Command-line and menu entry commands): Add a menu entry for
>> smbios.
>>>> ---
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> There was some interest on help-grub about supporting SMBIOS access
>>>> upstream.
> 
> 
> I think having the capability to parse the SMBIOS data is certainly very 
> interesting to us, and currently we have the following use cases to make use 
> of it:
> 
> 1) We have a board that boots Linux and this board itself can be plugged into 
> one of different chassis types. We need to pass different parameters to the 
> kernel based on the "CHASSIS_TYPE" information that is passed by the bios in 
> the DMI / SMBIOS tables.
> 
> 2) We may have a USB stick that can go into multiple boards, and the exact 
> kernel to be loaded depends on the machine information (PRODUCT_NAME etc) 
> passed via the DMI. 
> 
> I hope that clarifies our usecase and needs where this functionality will be 
> immensely helpful.
> 
> Thanks,

Thanks Rajat, that does really explain things.  I'll take a closer look in the
next few days ...

P.

> 
> Rajat
> 
> 
> 
> 
>>>
>>> OOC, why?  Why would you need to do this?  I'm certainly not against
>>> doing this but just wondering exactly why you want to do this.
>>
>> The thread on grub-help asked about booting particular kernel versions off a
>> hot-pluggable drive based on the detected hardware, which this would
>> allow.
>>
>> I originally wrote it to change what options are available based on whether a
>> disk is being booted physically or virtually.  Since QEMU makes it easy to 
>> add
>> SMBIOS entries on the command line, I've also been using it for random
>> tweaks like showing a vga_text boot menu instead of gfxterm when running
>> QEMU with "-display curses".
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> David