Hi Mario,
On Sun, Mar 09, 2025 at 12:27:38AM -0600, Mario Limonciello wrote:
> The libsmbios package previously had consumers in the fwupd package for Dell
> systems.
> This has been changed in fwupd and it directly talks to the kernel instead of
> using
> the libsmbios library.
>
> There have been bug reports forwarded upstream that are totally ignored.
> There hasn't
> been any changes upstream in 5 years.
>
> The project is effectively dead upstream and tech debt to maintain in Debian
> without
> much utility or need.
AIUI you are the previous upstream for this package as well as
a contributor to relevant bits in upstream Linux. (That's a good
opportunity to say: thank you for your work!)
I looked into smbios recently due to an FTBFS RC bug (that Steve
McIntyre fixed almost immediately), #1092525, and left a comment there.
I am not involved with its maintenance, just a drive-by interested
party. With you being the subject-matter expert, perhaps it's worth
rehashing here and get your take as well!
First of all, it is also my understanding that libsmbios does not have
any reverse dependencies/third-party consumers in Debian. However,
src:libsmbios also produces the binary "smbios-utils" with several
command-line utilities. So it's not just a matter of whether the library
is useful, but also whether the utilities themselves are.
As I mentioned in #1092525, I am aware that most, if not all, of the
low-level functionality of these CLI utilities can now be performed
using the dell_* (dell_smbios especially) Linux kernel modules & sysfs.
However, to my knowledge, there is no clear replacement in terms of a
higher-level interface. For example, looking at the very straightforward
"getSystemId":
Libsmbios version: 2.4.3
Product Name: Latitude 7420
Vendor: Dell Inc.
BIOS Version: 1.34.2
System ID: 0x0A36
Service Tag: <removed>
Express Service Code: <removed>
Asset Tag: Not Specified
Property Ownership Tag:
The modern alternative is to fetch e.g. the Service Tag with:
cat /sys/class/dmi/id/chassis_serial
However, listing the Express Service Code is:
echo $((36#$(cat /sys/class/dmi/id/chassis_serial)))
So you need to know where to look, and what conversion to run.
In an even more pronounced example, "smbios-token-ctl" can fetch and set
a bunch of tokens ("BIOS" settings) with their names and descriptions:
# smbios-token-ctl
================================================================================
Token: 0x001e - Speaker (Disable)
value: bool = false
Desc: Disable the built-in speaker.
================================================================================
Token: 0x0028 - Auto-on (Disable)
value: bool = true
Desc: Disable the system's auto-on capabilities
================================================================================
[...]
The equivalent sysfs interface is:
# cat /sys/devices/platform/dell-smbios.0/tokens/001e_value; echo
00000000
However, there is no description of any of those (234 in my system)
tokens.
AFAIK the token ID->name is encoded in this CSV in the libsmbios source
package:
https://github.com/dell/libsmbios/blob/master/doc/token_list.csv
I think fwupd implements some of this functionality, but I am not sure
if it's equivalent or if there is feature parity.
As I final data point, I believe smbios-battery-ctl's functionality was
only very recently implemented in the kernel (v6.12); so while libsmbios
is indeed abandonware for the past 5 years, it was certainly still the
only way to perform a very useful function until a few months ago.
So all in all, I suppose the question is: are there modern replacements
for all of the utilities shipped by smbios-utils? If not, and given
smbios-utils now builds and works, are there any downsides in continuing
to ship it in unstable and trixie?
Thanks for your input in advance!
Regards,
Faidon
