SMBIOS Template Variables

The System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) specification defines data structures (and access methods) that can be used to read management information produced by the BIOS of a computer.

This allows us to gather hardware information about the running system and use that as part of our labels.

The Elemental Register Client gathers SMBIOS data running the dmidecode binary during the initial registration of the machine and sends that data to the Elemental Operator.

That data is used to render the template label variables in the MachineInventory associated to that machine.

Example

Having the following SMBIOS data:

System Information
	Manufacturer: My manufacturer
	Product Name: Awesome PC
	Version: Not Specified
	Serial Number: THX1138
	Family: Toretto

And setting the machineName to serial-${System Information/Serial Number} would result in the final value of serial-THX1138

A good use of SMBIOS data is to set up different labels for all your machines and get those values from the hardware directly.

Having your machineInventoryLabels on the machineRegistration set to SMBIOS data would allow you to use selectors down the line to select similar machines.

For example using the following label cpuFamily: "${Processor Information/Family} would allow you to use a selector to search for i7 cpus in your machine fleet.

registration example with SMBIOS template variables

apiVersion: elemental.cattle.io/v1beta1
kind: MachineRegistration
metadata:
  name: fire-nodes
  namespace: fleet-default
spec:
  config:
    cloud-config:
      users:
        - name: root
          passwd: root
    elemental:
      install:
        reboot: true
        device: /dev/sda
        debug: true
  machineInventoryLabels:
    element: fire
    manufacturer: "${System Information/Manufacturer}"
    productName: "${System Information/Product Name}"
    serialNumber: "${System Information/Serial Number}"
    machineUUID: "${System Information/UUID}"