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.
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Hack Week 19
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Comments
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over 5 years ago by bmwiedemann | Reply
I think there are tools parsing output of dmidecode: ohai and salt at least. Probably more. hwinfo?
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over 5 years ago by jdelvare | Reply
hwinfo has its own DMI table decoder, it does not rely on dmidecode.
I didn't know about ohai (I don't even know what it is) and salt. The output of dmidecode is plain text currently, it can be parsed if you are motivated enough, just you have to write your own parser and hope that the output format will never change in a way that will break your parser. I can understand why people would prefer a more structured output format.
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over 5 years ago by jdelvare | Reply
Yesterday I posted the patch set which gets rid of all open-coded printfs.
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