VirtualBox: SMBIOS Type 3 wrong format

[jmkerdal]

Hello,

I'm new in this forum. Before asking my question, I must said that it's very interessting to learn how OS works.
I'm living in France and interesting by low level programming languages. Sorry by advance for my poor English.

So this is my question:

Reading SMBIOS with WMware or QEMU is OK. While reading SMBIOS with VirtualBox, at Type 3 I've this issue.

As you see SMBIOS version is 2.5 with 10 entrys. Type 0, 1, 2 have been read correctly before.

In the documentation Type 3 > 2.1, len is supposed to be 0Dh. So it's OK we have the minimum (in blue).
After (in green) the string terminated with 0 and the second 0 as expected to terminate the structure.

So after, in QEMU or WMvare, we will found type 4 (Processor Information). Here not, we have Type 126 and until end of structure other with the Type 128 that doesn't exist in documentation.
So I think that here the table is incorrect. You can see in the memory dump what I get.

What's wrong?

[SpyderTL]

I'd have to do a little more digging to read the actual data, but I can tell you that I'm getting the same list of tables that you are getting when running in VirtualBox 6.0.

10 Tables
0, 1, 2, 3, 126, 126, 126, 11, 128, 127

I'll look through the string data and see if I'm getting the same results there.

EDIT: According to Wikipedia, anything over 127 is reserved for OEM specific data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_BIOS

EDIT2: I found this bug in the VirtualBox bug tracker:
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17696

Looks like it is a known issue, known at least for 10 years, and so low priority that no one has bothered fixing it. So you can probably safely ignore it, unless you need that table 4 to exist for some reason. VirtualBox is open source, so you could probably fix it for them, if you wanted...

[jmkerdal]

Thank you for your reply.

So it's a know bug since 10 year It's for testing my code, so I'll stop to use VirtualBox for this purpose. WMvare and QEMU works fortunally.

PS: I've not the time to fix the bug from VirtualBox code for the moment.