Projects in the topic dmidecode

The SMBIOS specification includes an informative annex providing conformance guidelines for DMI table implementations. I would like to write a checker tool to verify the conformance of DMI tables, based on this document. Such a tool could be useful for system firmware writers. We already have dmidecode which is able to locate and decode DMI tables. It should be fairly easy to reuse the same core and add an alternative structure parser, which would perform the checks instead of printing the decoded information.

There's a long standing request to extend the output of dmidecode to something that would be machine-readable. Something like an XML or JSON-based format. Unfortunately this can't be implemented right now because the output of dmidecode is generated by open-coded printfs as the DMI table is being parsed, with no intermediate structures nor temporary buffers. While implementing a machine-parseable output is out of scope for a single hack week, let's remember that even the longest journey starts with a single footstep. I would like to try and rewrite the 5200 lines of code of dmidecode in such a way that printing the output would be somewhat separated from parsing the DMI table and done by a limited set of dedicated functions. Alternative output formats could later hook into such functions.

Project Description

The DMI table may contain BIOS-based error information. Currently dmidecode is not able to decode it. However an experimental patch was contributed a few years ago, which could be used as a starting point to enable this feature.