smbios and firmware versions for machines without a bios

[Richard Hughes]

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

Thanks,

Richard.