Re: SMBios configuration table not present until late stage of boot

["Tomas Pilar (tpilar)" <tpilar@solarflare.com>]

The problem to solve is uniquely and persistently identifying which NICs 
are grouped together in which host to a third party management system 
over LAN during preboot in a reasonably secure way.

If we use a random generated UUID every reboot, we're not persistent. If 
we store the UUID across reboot, you could take the NIC out and move it 
to a different host and keep the ID. So the idea was to construct it 
from either the System UUID or using mobo/cpu serial numbers.

Cheers,

Tom

On 18/05/17 19:26, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> On 05/18/17 17:28, Tomas Pilar (tpilar) wrote:
>> This is what I was afraid of. I am writing an IHV network driver that
>> lives in optionROM.
> Out of curiosity, if you can share it, what do you need the sytem UUID
> in a network driver for?
>
> Thank you,
> Laszlo
>
>> Cheers,
>> Tom
>>
>> On 18/05/17 16:25, Jim.Dailey@dell.com wrote:
>>> It is a tricky problem.
>>>
>>> What I would like is for a new protocol to be defined, which should
>>> not rely on devices, to contain certain identifying information
>>> like this that would be useful to device drivers. It could be
>>> created early in DXE.
>>>
>>> What I fear is some future requirement that SMBIOS be made available
>>> at some definitive time pre-OS boot.
>>>
>>> You may have to get support from the BIOS vendor. If you are doing a
>>> driver for a particular system, that might not be too bad of a
>>> solution; but if you're trying to develop some generic driver, I
>>> don't have a good suggestion.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Jim
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: edk2-devel [mailto:edk2-devel-bounces@lists.01.org] On Behalf Of
>>> Tomas Pilar (tpilar)
>>> Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:14 AM
>>> To: Dailey, Jim <Jim_Dailey@Dell.com>
>>> Cc: edk2-devel@lists.01.org
>>> Subject: Re: [edk2] SMBios configuration table not present until late
>>> stage of boot
>>>
>>> This does make sense. Do you have a suggestion how I would go about
>>> finding/creating a unique identifier for the system during preboot?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Tom
>>>
>>> On 18/05/17 16:11, Jim.Dailey@dell.com wrote:
>>>> Not a helpful comment, but I wanted to air my feelings on the topic:
>>>>
>>>> I view SMBIOS as data strictly for OS-level consumption and not for
>>>> any pre-boot code.  I'm sure I'm in the minority, however.
>>>>
>>>> One of the problems is that the BIOS needs to have scanned all
>>>> devices/resources and perhaps executed a connect all before the
>>>> tables can be generated (or at least completed).
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Jim
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: edk2-devel [mailto:edk2-devel-bounces@lists.01.org] On Behalf
>>>> Of Tomas Pilar (tpilar)
>>>> Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:01 AM
>>>> To: edk2-devel@lists.01.org
>>>> Subject: [edk2] SMBios configuration table not present until late
>>>> stage of boot
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I am trying to read the system UUID from the System Table (Type 1) in
>>>> the SMBios set of tables. I am doing this during DriverBinding.Start()
>>>> part of the UEFI_DRIVER initialisation. Unfortunately the
>>>> gST->ConfigurationTable only contains 6 tables and SMBios is not one of
>>>> them.
>>>>
>>>> Once I boot into UEFI shell or start a PXE booting process, the
>>>> gST->ConfigurationTable now contains 8 tables and SMBios is one of the
>>>> two new tables. If I however only boot to a HDD, this never seems to
>>>> happen.
>>>>
>>>> Can someone offer some insight why this might be so and how would I go
>>>> about forcing the platform to provide the SMBios in
>>>> gST->ConfigurationTable at a sensible point?
>>>>
>>>> Incidentally it seems ExitBootServices is not signaled on this platform
>>>> if the boot goes through to HDD either, which is another strange
>>>> thing ...
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Tom
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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