[flashrom] DMI matching patch

[Michael Karcher]

Am Montag, den 04.01.2010, 15:35 +0100 schrieb Luc Verhaegen:
> Some extra info on dmi that not everyone is acutely aware of:
> 
> This is where the dmi standard came from: 
> http://www.dmtf.org/standards/dmi/
> 
> What you can read there is:
> 
> "Due to the rapid advancement of DMTF technologies, such as CIM, the 
> DMTF defined an "End of Life" process for its Desktop Management 
> Interface (DMI), which ended March 31, 2005"

You are right, DMI is outdated. However that doesn't really affect us.
DMI is a complicated bloated remote API to access lots of system
information. It has been replaced by even more bloated and high-level
APIs as CIM.

A small subset of the info DMI could retrieve is the system information
provided by the BIOS. This information was provided by the "Desktop
Management BIOS specification". This specification was renamed to
"System Management BIOS specification" when it got part of the DMTF to
show that it is only a piece that is needed to get DMI to work.

What dmidecode does is just a dump of the SMBIOS database. The name
dmidecode is for historic reason, smbiosdecode would be more accurate.
This database is standardized in the SMBIOS specification, which is
still alive, see
http://www.dmtf.org/standards/smbios/

The latest revision is v2.6.1 from April 2009.

Regards,
  Michael Karcher