I was recently told that someone had installed OpenLMI and it wasn’t working. They ran the hwinfo command to test the installation and it wasn’t reporting the correct information – most of the information was reported as “not specified” or “N/A”.

It turns out that they had installed OpenLMI in a virtual machine – and that most of the hardware information was, in fact, not available.

In a virtual machine:

lmi> hwinfo
Hostname:         localhost.localdomain

Chassis Type:     Other
Manufacturer:     Bochs
Model:            Not Specified (Bochs)
Serial Number:    Not Specified
Asset Tag:        0
Virtual Machine:  N/A

Motherboard info: N/A

CPU:              Not Specified
Topology:         1 cpu(s), 1 core(s), 1 thread(s)
Max Freq:         2000 MHz
Arch:             x86_64

Memory:           1.0 GB
Modules:          1.0 GB, RAM (DIMM), Not Specified
Slots:            1 used, N/A total
lmi>

For the physical system this VM was running on:

lmi> hwinfo
Hostname:        testbeda

Chassis Type:    Desktop
Manufacturer:    Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Model:           GA-MA78GM-S2H
Serial Number:   Not Specified
Asset Tag:       0
Virtual Machine: N/A

Motherboard:     GA-MA78GM-S2H
Manufacturer:    Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.

CPU:             AMD Phenom(tm) 9550 Quad-Core Processor
Topology:        1 cpu(s), 1 core(s), 1 thread(s)
Max Freq:        3000 MHz
Arch:            x86_64

Memory:          4.0 GB
Modules:         2.0 GB, 800 MHz, None, Bank0/1
2.0 GB, 800 MHz, None, Bank2/3
Slots:           2 used, 4 total
lmi>

There is much more information available from the physical system. The only things missing are the asset tag and the serial number, which I haven’t assigned for this system.

The lesson here: you can use the hwinfo command on a virtual machine, but you won’t get much useful information. The VM should not be able to get this information – if it can, there is leakage between the physical and virtual systems.