This patchset applies to v2.6.38-rc6. The following series exports information the DMI / SMBIOS tables via sysfs under the path /sys/firmware/dmi.
For our purposes, we actively use the System Event Log, as described by DMI entry Type 15. Currently, we have to grub around /dev/mem to find this thing, and potentially need to issue IOs directly from userland to get at the event log, which is suboptimal in terms of security and architecture. This series implements the basics needed to iterate through the DMI entries safely from userland. Each entry has the handle, the formatted length and the raw bytes exposed in their own sub-directory under /sys/firmware/dmi/entries/<type>-<instance>. As well, this series explodes type 15 as a proof-of-concept of how we can expose kernel interpretations of the entry data. For most entries, there isn't much sense in parsing the entry and exposing each field as a sysfs attribute as they can be interpreted from userland by accessing the raw entry itself. Type 15 however describes an indirection (pointing at the system event log), and it is generally useful to export this log in raw form to the user (which requires interpreting the DMI entry). This driver relies solely on dmi_walk() for access to the dmi entries. They are not kept mapped in the "rest" state. The only bits memo-ized by the objects in sysfs are the dmi headers, which are used to the find the entries via dmi_walk on read. Reading the raw bytes however is 'uncached' by this driver, so that any changes to the entries themselves are reflected properly by the user-exposed interface. We intend to use this on our production servers, though it seems to also be sufficient in suiting Chrome OS's needs (http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=6795). Thanks, Mike Waychison Related discussions =================== - Andi Kleen suggesting that perhaps this data could be exported via sysfs: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2010/9/28/4625643/thread - Tim Hockin suggesting a potential layout: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/2/10/550 Patchset summary ================ firmware: Add DMI entry types to the headers firmware: Basic dmi-sysfs support firmware: Break out system_event_log in dmi-sysfs firmware: Expose DMI type 15 System Event Log firmware: Add documentation for /sys/firmware/dmi Diffstat ======== Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-firmware-dmi | 110 ++++ drivers/firmware/Kconfig | 11 drivers/firmware/Makefile | 1 drivers/firmware/dmi-sysfs.c | 698 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ include/linux/dmi.h | 47 + 5 files changed, 867 insertions(+) Changelog: ========== - v2 - Added 'type', 'instance' and 'position' attributes to each DMI entry. - Don't printk KERN_INFO on module load/unload. - Default to 'n' for Kconfig. - Grammar fixes. - Fixed bug reading raw files when multiple instances of the same type exist. - v1 - Initial public send-out. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
