Bug 747324

Summary:	Error message being printed to stdout and not stderr 'SMBIOS implementations newer than version 2.6 are not fully supported by this version of dmidecode.'
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6	Reporter:	Lee Yarwood <lyarwood>
Component:	dmidecode	Assignee:	Anton Arapov <anton>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	qe-baseos-daemons
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	6.1	CC:	kbooth, nobody
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:
Clones:	806845 (view as bug list)		Environment:
Last Closed:	2011-10-20 12:02:11 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:
Bug Blocks:	806845

Description Lee Yarwood 2011-10-19 13:52:38 UTC

Description of problem:

When dmidecode encounters an issue with the SMBIOS version it prints the following error out to stdout. While this error is obviously correct it does play havoc with scripts attempting to parse it's output. A number of customers that have hit this issue have suggested that these errors are printed to stderr to allow for an easier work around in scripts etc.

# /usr/sbin/dmidecode -s system-uuid
# SMBIOS implementations newer than version 2.6 are not
# fully supported by this version of dmidecode.
1234-5678-5A43-4A30-31383031434C

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
dmidecode-2.10-1.30.1.el6.x86_64

How reproducible:
Attempt to access parse dmidecode output when SMBIOS is newer than version 2.6.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run any command when SMBIOS is newer than version 2.6.
2.
3.
  
Actual results:
Error message printed to stdout.

Expected results:
Error message printed to stderr.

Additional info:

Comment 2 Anton Arapov 2011-10-20 11:48:15 UTC

Lee,
  it's not an error message, it's INFO message. All the error messages are already routed to stderr. This very message is intentionally left to stdout because it IS important. And it can be easily filtered out in a shell scripts.
  We are not going to fix it.

Let me know if you have any concerns. Otherwise I close it.

Comment 5 Anton Arapov 2012-03-23 10:06:50 UTC

  The message is important because we can't guarantee the output is correct in that case. If we suppress it we might be getting reports of the wrong information interpretation. IOW users will complaint about all kind of weirdness dmidecode might show them when use new hardware.
  I will update the documentation and man page to define this behaviour.

Comment 6 Ken Booth 2012-03-23 21:37:55 UTC

Hi Anton,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. The customer is now happy, especially after I told him we will change the documentation.

Regards,
Ken.

Comment 7 Anton Arapov 2012-03-26 10:47:56 UTC

FYI:

http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/man/dmidecode.8?root=dmidecode&r1=1.24&r2=1.25