Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] hw/arm/virt: smbios: inform guest of kvm

[Peter Maydell]

On 23 September 2015 at 08:43, Peter Maydell <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 23 September 2015 at 07:18, Andrew Jones <address@hidden> wrote:
>> ARM/AArch64 KVM guests don't have any way to identify
>> themselves as KVM guests (x86 guests use a CPUID leaf). Now, we
>> could discuss all sorts of reasons why guests shouldn't need to
>> know that, but then there's always some case where it'd be
>> nice... Anyway, now that we have SMBIOS tables in ARM guests,
>> it's easy for the guest to know that it's a QEMU instance. This
>> patch takes that one step further, also identifying KVM, when
>> appropriate. Again, we could debate why generally nothing
>> should care whether it's of type QEMU or QEMU/KVM, but again,
>> sometimes it's nice to know...
>
> This doesn't seem great to me, because it's ACPI/SMBIOS
> specific. A mechanism that worked whether the guest was
> booted via APCI or DT would seem preferable to me...

...and, on a more careful reread, I don't like the way the
behaviour is changing for "this is KVM" rather than "and it's
KVM" being an additional piece of information.

thanks
-- PMM