Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH 2.4] add SMBIOS information to /proc/smbios -- UPDATED | From | Michael Brown <> | Date | Fri, 30 Apr 2004 22:30:04 -0500 |
| |
On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 14:22, Andi Kleen wrote: > Michael Brown <mebrown@michaels-house.net> writes: > > > Below is an updated patch to add SMBIOS information to /proc/smbios. > > Updates have been made per Al's previous comments. Please apply. > > What is this good for? There are tools to read this from > /dev/mem; and that is fine because the information is static. > There is no reason to bloat the kernel with this.
As I mentioned in my first posting of this to l-k, there are three reasons why this driver is necessary:
-- This information is, in the very near future, _not_ going to be static anymore. There will be systems that update the information in dynamically during SMIs.
-- SMBIOS consists of two things, the table entry point and the table itself. The table entry point is always in 0xF0000 - 0xFFFFF. Traditionally, the actual table has been here as well. BIOS is running out of space here and future systems are moving this information to high memory. /dev/mem will not allow access to memory above top of system RAM.
-- Red Hat has a /dev/mem patch in their tree that restricts access to RAM above 1MB.
Because of all of these reasons, we feel it is a good thing to have a stable method to get to the SMBIOS information that will work into the future. Our userspace libs will try to use this driver to access SMBIOS, but fall back to /dev/mem if this driver is not available. (with the caveat that nothing will work if table >1MB and this driver not present.)
As for the "bloat" argument: this driver is about the most trivial driver I can conceive of that does useful work. It is 250 raw lines of code, comparable in size to /proc/meminfo or /proc/cpuinfo.
This 250 line driver allows us to move a few thousand lines of code from Dell's current, proprietary systems management driver into userspace. If this approach is accepted, I am pushing to work on opening up other pieces of Dell's current proprietary drivers. This work is a proof-of-concept to management that this approach can work. -- Michael
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |