Leveraging and extending smbios-mdr

[Artem Senichev]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 03:47:04PM +0000, Garrett, Mike (HPE Server Firmware) wrote:
> Hello Artem and all,
> 
> We are integrating smbios-mdr into our build.  Our SMBIOS info is downloaded and built as a file in the filesystem using proprietary means (our CHIF - channel interface).  Our hope is that we can simply point the smbios-mdr service at it and light up new information about the platform in dbus, Redfish, and the GUI.
> 
> However, I can't find much in the way of documentation about smbios-mdr.

If we are talking about the MDR2 project (https://github.com/Intel-BMC/mdrv2),
there is no documentation, but I don't think we really need it.
It is just a SMBIOS dump parser for some table types (CPU, DIMM).
The table format is fully documented in the SMBIOS specification:
https://www.dmtf.org/standards/smbios

> I'm especially interested in how to extend the functionality past just CPUs and DIMMs into things like OEM records supplied by the BIOS.

What about phosphor-inventory-manager?

> Seems like the possibilities are:
> 
> 1. Smbios-mdr has a generic dbus API and we write an independent service to query it for this info and publish to dbus
> 2. We create a generic extension mechanism for smbios-mdr for vendors to add OEM support and push to dbus directly from smbios-mdr (like w/ CPUs/DIMMs)
> 3. We fork smbios-mdr and extend it (not preferred).
> 
> I'd like to hear how best to leverage this recipe.

-- 
Regards,
Artem Senichev
Software Engineer, YADRO.