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

[Rajat Jain]

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,

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