Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/3] SMBIOS table passthrough support

[Ross Philipson <Ross.Philipson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Campbell [mailto:Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 3:47 AM
> To: Ross Philipson
> Cc: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/3] SMBIOS table passthrough support
> 
> On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 02:56 +0000, Ross Philipson wrote:
> > Updates to the layout of the HVM parameter and information page
> > defined in hvm_info_table.h. The SMBIOS pass-through tables are
> > written to the bottom half of this page.
> 
> We would like to eventually get rid of the HVM info page and would
> certainly like to avoid adding anything further there. Could this data
> not be supplied via xenstore? Certainly they could and should be for the
> ones controlled by the flags entry which you add.
> 
> Ian.
> 

Ah I did not realize that. The original incarnation of this code came from 2+ 
years ago. I have no objection to using xenstore but I did not think xenstore 
was suitable for passing arbitrary blocks of binary data (i.e. the raw SMBIOS 
firmware tables). Perhaps I am incorrect in this assumption.

I am not sure what other mechanisms could be employed. In other code I use in 
out hvmloader, I pass an ACPI SSDT to the hvmloader at runtime. I use a little 
DMAish interface I built into qemu to push the SSDT to hvmloader while it is 
building the ACPI tables. Something like this could be used but I don't really 
want to get qemu involved in this operation.

I guess a third option might be to have a facility to load extra modules/files 
into the new domain at start time and specify their gpa's in xenstore. They 
could then be discarded after the initial domain setup is complete.

Anyway, any thoughts or suggestions are most welcome, thanks.

Ross


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