smbios keys deprecated

[Richard Hughes]

On 28/02/07, David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 21:44 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > Attached are two patches against hal and hal-info that deprecate the
> > smbios.* keys and replace them with:
> >
> > smbios.system.manufacturer    -> system.hardware.manufacturer
> > smbios.system.product         -> system.hardware.product
> > smbios.system.version         -> system.hardware.version
> > smbios.system.serial          -> system.hardware.serial
> > smbios.system.uuid            -> system.hardware.uuid
> > smbios.bios.vendor            -> system.firmware.vendor
> > smbios.bios.version           -> system.firmware.version
> > smbios.bios.release_date      -> system.firmware.release_date
> > smbios.chassis.manufacturer   -> system.chassis.manufacturer
> > smbios.chassis.type           -> system.chassis.type
> >
> > This means stuff like OLPC and N800 doesn't have to use the
> > smbios.bios.* prefix for system firmware and is therefore more abstract.
> >
> > This is important to get in before 0.5.9 as hal-info spec can't change
> > after it's formally released.
> >
> > The old keys are copied from the new names, so everything should work as
> > it used to.
>
> In general I'm in favor of this but am a bit unhappy just basing our
> abstraction on what SMBIOS provides and how the smbios namespace was
> constructed (which was done solely by looking at dmidecode). So some
> thinking about whether this is really a good abstraction would be
> useful.

Sure, the chassis thing (we discussed on IRC) we can change in the
next few days if requried; it doesn't change anything hal-info and is
thus less critical.

> Also, there's some annoying inconsistencies right now e.g.
>
>  system.hardware.manufacturer
>  system.firmware.vendor
>
> we should probably use 'vendor' for both. Or perhaps we need subvendor
> too just like PCI. That requires thinking about how the real world
> works, e.g. what about Alienware that rebrands Dell machines? Also, at
> the very least having some kind of

I've fixed the patches up to use vendor. I'm not sure subvendor is
very obvious, although it might be one to investigate later.

>  system.firmware.type = 'smbios', 'omap', 'linuxbios', 'efi'
>
> or whatever as well as
>
>  system.hardware.type = 'pc', 'pc98', 'apple-ppc', 'apple-intel'
>
> might be useful. So that requires a lot of thinking (am not saying what
> I proposed above is right).

Sure, we can add these later.

> There's also things in the patch like this
>
> > +                <literal>system.firmware.release_date</literal> (string)
> > +              </entry>
> > +              <entry></entry>
> > +              <entry>No</entry>
> > +              <entry>
> > +                The release date of the BIOS.
>
> that probably needs tuning up. I think you meant s/BIOS/firmware/ for
> example.

Nice one, fixed.

> So I think this requires more work. Thanks!

Sure, agreed. I'm about to merge the initial changes as agreed on IRC
and I can fix stuff up and add the extra keys after we've discussed
them on the mailing list.

Cheers,

Richard.