Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v3 2/2] smbios: Set system manufacturer, product & version by default

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 04:18:16PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 01:56:40PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> > From: Markus Armbruster <address@hidden>
> > 
> > Currently, we get SeaBIOS defaults: manufacturer Bochs, product Bochs,
> > no version.  Best SeaBIOS can do, but we can provide better defaults:
> > manufacturer QEMU, product & version taken from QEMUMachine desc and
> > name.
> > 
> > Take care to do this only for new machine types, of course.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <address@hidden>
> 
> I feel applying this one would be a mistake.
> 
> Machine desc is for human readers.
> For example, it currently says "Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)"
> but if we add a variant with IDE compatibility mode we will likely want to
> tweak it to say "Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9/AHCI mode, 2009)"
> and add another one saying ""Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9/compat mode,
> 2009)".
> 
> In other words we want the ability to tweak
> description retroactively, and exposing it to guest will
> break this ability.
> 
> So we really need a new field not tied to the human description.
> 

You have a point, but if we do that one day, then we can add a new
smbios-specific field and set it for each of the existing machine-types
so they keep the same ABI. This patch doesn't make us unable to do that
in the future.

As we are past hard freeze, I think this simple patch is better than a
more complex solution for a problem we still don't have (that can still
be implemented in 1.8).

-- 
Eduardo