Comment 0 for bug 2045561

SRU Justification

[Impact]

The kvm flavours currently do not enable CONFIG_DMI_SYSFS. This stops VMs using these kernels from being configurable using qemu or cloud-hypervisor's SMBIOS type 11 strings. This feature is supported and used widely by systemd:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/smbios-type-11.html
https://systemd.io/CREDENTIALS/

A user launching a VM using the linux-kvm kernel image is not able to specify SMBIOS strings to automatically configured userspace services and programs due to the lack of this kconfig. We make extensive use of these in systemd's upstream CI, which is running on Github Actions, which uses Jammy, so it would be great to have this kconfig enabled and backported.

[Fix]

Please consider enabling the following kconfigs:

CONFIG_DMI_SYSFS

These are already enabled in the 'main' kernel config, and in other distros.

To verify this works, it is sufficient to check that the /sys/firmware/dmi/entries/ directory in sysfs is present:

$ ls /sys/firmware/dmi/entries/
0-0 126-1 126-4 126-8 130-0 133-0 136-0 140-2 15-0 18-0 21-1 221-1 24-0 7-1 8-2 8-6
1-0 126-10 126-5 126-9 131-0 134-0 14-0 140-3 16-0 19-0 219-0 221-2 3-0 7-2 8-3 9-0
12-0 126-2 126-6 127-0 131-1 135-0 140-0 140-4 17-0 2-0 22-0 221-3 4-0 8-0 8-4 9-1
126-0 126-3 126-7 13-0 132-0 135-1 140-1 14-1 17-1 21-0 221-0 222-0 7-0 8-1 8-5

Without this kconfig, the directory won't be there. Once enabled, it will be there.

[Regression Potential]

Enabling a new DMI option could affect the DMI subsystem in unforeseen ways.