smbios and firmware versions for machines without a bios

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

I've been traveling so sorry for the lag,

On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 09:31 +0200, Richard Hughes wrote:
> For stuff like OLPC and Nokia 770 we need to export the firmware (sort
> of like a BIOS) version to userspace. 
> 
> Having a name like smbios.bios.version seems odd on embedded products
> are there is no bios, and hence it's difficult to add corresponding
> keys. Plus I think the smbios.bios.* prefix sucks (and AFAICS it is not
> documented in the spec).
> 
> Two options:
> 
> * Export this using a kernel sysfs class (firmware?) with the versions
> in that - we still need to do dmi probing on i386
> * Depreciate smbios.bios.* and have hardware.version, hardware.product,
> etc.
> 
> Even with the first option we would need new keys such as
> firmware.version and firmware.product_name so we are going to need to
> change things either way.
> 
> What's the consensus on this? Obviously any API change would be
> backwards compatible for one year like power_management.suspend_to_disk

I think it's somewhat fine to still have smbios.* stuff still present.
Abstract stuff goes in system.* e.g.

  system.vendor = 'Apple Computer, Inc.'  (string)
  system.product = 'MacBookPro1,1 1.0'  (string)
  system.formfactor = 'laptop'  (string)
  system.kernel.name = 'Linux'  (string)
  system.kernel.version = '2.6.19-1.2914.fc7'  (string)
  system.kernel.machine = 'i686'  (string)

So I think you just want

  system.firmware.type (string) - smbios, openfirwmare, whatever

and so forth. Would that work? If so, writing up a spec to the spec to
define these and also copying some smbios properties over would probably
be the way forward.. yes?

      David