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

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 12:29:16PM -0200, Eduardo Habkost wrote:
> 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.

We'll likely forget and just break guest ABI.
So we really need a unit test for this, too.

> 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).

I don't see why we need to rush this into 1.7.
Downstreams want their info in smbios for support, branding etc,
but I don't see a burning need for this in upstream QEMU.
It's kind of nice to have it say "QEMU", but we can afford to
delay and do it properly for 1.8.

> -- 
> Eduardo