dmidecode, SMBIOS 3.0, and the hardware certification PPA

[Roderick W. Smith]

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Hi all,

I've only recently been made aware of this bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dmidecode/+bug/1578022

In brief, the version of dmidecode delivered with Xenial and earlier
doesn't work correctly with the latest SMBIOS versions. A fix is
available, but is not yet in the standard Xenial repos. I've therefore
taken the liberty of copying Colin's Xenial test package from his PPA
to our certification PPA (ppa:hardware-certification/public), for both
Xenial and Trusty. I've tested both, and they work, although my test
platforms don't support SMBIOS 3.0, so I'm relying on the bug reports'
claims that the fix works properly for SMBIOS 3.0.

One big caveat: On my test deployments (using MAAS to deploy the
server version of Ubuntu), the old version of dmidecode is installed,
simply because it's included in the custom images we deploy. I'm not
sure what would happen on a client deployment, although I suspect the
same would be true there. Thus, using the updated dmidecode will
require doing a "sudo apt-get install dmidecode" before use. The
silver lining to this is that if you don't want to use the new
version, it's easy enough to avoid it -- at least for server testing.
Jeff, if you like, I can modify our MAAS preseed file to install the
updated dmidecode automatically. This doesn't seem to be a pressing
need, so I'll leave it until I hear from you next week.

If putting this updated dmidecode in our shared PPA is a problem, just
say so and I'll remove it -- or remove it yourself if it's causing
immediate problems. In theory, the version that's being SRU'd into
Xenial should take precedence over the version in our PPA, but that
version will never make it into Trusty, so we may yet have need of it
there.

- -- 
Rod Smith
Server and Cloud Certification Engineer
rod.smith at canonical.com
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