[PATCH 00/10] SMBIOS improvements

[Heinrich Schuchardt]

On 8/26/24 20:23, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2024 at 11:58:54AM -0600, Simon Glass wrote:
>> Hi Caleb,
>>
>> On Mon, 19 Aug 2024 at 17:03, Caleb Connolly <caleb.connolly at linaro.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Simon,
>>>
>>>> As a general comment, this is adding a load of code which is used by a
>>>> lot of platforms. As more and more aarch64 platforms are created, this
>>>> data grows. Why not use the devicetree for this hardware information?
>>>> That is what it is for.
>>>
>>> This data does not belong in devicetree, the various system registers
>>> exist to describe this information... Putting it in DT would be
>>> duplicating it.
>>
>> I am not wanting to duplicate info which can be read from system registers.
>>
>>>
>>> Using DT for this would additionally require having bindings accepted
>>> upstream and for all SoCs to add them. To what end?
>>
>> To get the correct information in there. How are boards supposed to
>> add SMBIOS info? Do we end up creating a whole infra in U-Boot just
>> for the driver to read it out? It just doesn't make any sense to me...
>>
>> Let's put hardware info in the DT where it belongs.
>
> I'm a little confused here because of some older threads on this overall
> topic. Part of the issue here is that in user space, "everyone" has
> SMBIOS-based tooling today, and wants to have that work, rather than
> inventing new tooling or modify existing tooling. And you were concerned
> I thought that we had tied SMBIOS too much to EFI being present when
> indeed it should be possible to pass the location along to the OS
> without EFI, but at the time Linux at least only supported that notion
> on MIPS I think?
>

Looking at the Linux kernel code, only x86 can discover an SMBIOS table
without EFI. We should not ride that dead horse.

Best regards

Heinrich