[vbox-dev] How to populate a Linux VM with the items requested by a dmidecode -t 17

Rodney Lott rlott at evertz.com
Mon Nov 12 13:52:24 GMT 2018


Thanks, Mihal.

That worked perfectly! To answer your first question, the guest is used to test various software, including an installation ISO. Part of the installer uses dmidecode -t17 to detect the amount of RAM and indicate to the user if they have enough memory to complete the install. This works fine with real hardware, but the VM didn't report any of that, hence my problem.

Best regards,

Rodney

On 2018-11-09 06:34 PM, Mihai Hanor wrote:
Hi,

Why is it necessary for the guest?

Run this command and see if it does what you want:
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiExposeMemoryTable 1
Source: www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12017?cversion=0&cnum_hist=1#comment:5<http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/12017?cversion=0&cnum_hist=1#comment:5>



Regards,
Mihai

On Fri, 9 Nov 2018 at 22:29, Rodney Lott <rlott at evertz.com<mailto:rlott at evertz.com>> wrote:
Hi, there.

First, my details:

Host machine:
rlott at rlott-brix:~$ uname -a; lsb_release -a
Linux rlott-brix 4.13.0-46-generic #51-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 12 12:36:29 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:    Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 17.10
Release:    17.10
Codename:    artful
VirtualBox version: 5.2.6 r120293 (Qt5.9.1)
Guest VM: Custom Ubuntu version
root at magtestvm:/udata/home/etdev# uname -a; lsb_release
Linux magtestvm 4.4.0-116-generic #140~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 16 09:25:20 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I was wondering if there was a way to populate the DMI information to simulate memory banks for a Linux-based VM. If I do a dmidecode -t17 on my guest, I see the following:

root at magtestvm:/udata/home/etdev# dmidecode -t17
# dmidecode 2.12
SMBIOS 2.5 present.

Upon further examination, I saw in the full dmidecode output that no such memory bank sections existed.

I found this section in the manual about setting DMI information: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#idm5744

I saw in this piece of the source code that it does support DMI Memory (type 17): https://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Devices/PC/DevFwCommon.cpp

So, is there such a call to set various things like this?

    VBoxManage setextradata <my_guest_vm> VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiMemory/<some_key> <some_value>

If so, would you point me to where a list of values for <some_key> would be?

Thanks very much!

Rodney


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