Re: [PATCH qemu-server] fix #5578: smbios: set serial number

[Stoiko Ivanov <s.ivanov@proxmox.com>]

sorry - sent too soon.

further comments inline:
On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:24:14 +0100
Stoiko Ivanov <s.ivanov@proxmox.com> wrote:

> Thanks for tackling this!
> 
> comments/questions inline:
> 
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:29:35 +0100
> Manuel Federanko <m.federanko@proxmox.com> wrote:
> 
> > If no smbios options are given on creation, default to generate a serial
> > number. This is required for Windows Autopilot to identify a user
> > device.  
> The commit message could include a few more details - explaining some
> choices - e.g. - the bugzilla request suggest to use a (substring of) the
> smbios UUID (which should be unique and thus maybe a ok choice for a
> machine-serial number) as serial number - why did you chose to generate
> another random string? (if possible re-using parts of the uuid would sound
> elegant to me)

also - how did you test this? - adding such information can go a long way
to reproducing your results.


> 
> 
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Manuel Federanko <m.federanko@proxmox.com>
> > ---
> >  src/PVE/API2/Qemu.pm  | 5 ++++-
> >  src/PVE/CLI/qm.pm     | 5 ++++-
> >  src/PVE/QemuServer.pm | 6 ++++++
> >  3 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> > 
> > diff --git a/src/PVE/API2/Qemu.pm b/src/PVE/API2/Qemu.pm
> > index c2e185a6..8d1e3ec0 100644
> > --- a/src/PVE/API2/Qemu.pm
> > +++ b/src/PVE/API2/Qemu.pm
> > @@ -1471,7 +1471,10 @@ __PACKAGE__->register_method({
> >  
> >                      # auto generate uuid if user did not specify smbios1 option
> >                      if (!$conf->{smbios1}) {
> > -                        $conf->{smbios1} = PVE::QemuServer::generate_smbios1_uuid();
> > +                        $conf->{smbios1} =
> > +                            PVE::QemuServer::generate_smbios1_uuid() . ","
> > +                            . PVE::QemuServer::generate_smbios1_serial()
> > +                            . ",base64=1";  
why add the base64 here - the commit introducing it mentions embedded
nul-bytes:
https://git.proxmox.com/?p=qemu-server.git;a=commitdiff;h=1f30ac3a9f18c215d3e3c657f9e81d9d3125f46c

I guess from a quick look that you need to change that part to add the
uuid and the serial as separate keys to smbios1 (smbios1 is a
property_string (a not deeply nested has stored as a string in our config
file) - see
https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-common.git;a=blob;f=src/PVE/JSONSchema.pm;h=17e7126a6c42f8326a1da890680af10b6106d906;hb=HEAD#l1041


> 
> >                      }
> >  
> >                      if (
> > diff --git a/src/PVE/CLI/qm.pm b/src/PVE/CLI/qm.pm
> > index bdae9641..44c74eed 100755
> > --- a/src/PVE/CLI/qm.pm
> > +++ b/src/PVE/CLI/qm.pm
> > @@ -912,7 +912,10 @@ __PACKAGE__->register_method({
> >          eval {
> >              # order matters, as do_import() will load_config() internally
> >              $conf->{vmgenid} = PVE::QemuServer::generate_uuid();
> > -            $conf->{smbios1} = PVE::QemuServer::generate_smbios1_uuid();
> > +            $conf->{smbios1} =
> > +                PVE::QemuServer::generate_smbios1_uuid() . ","
> > +                . PVE::QemuServer::generate_smbios1_serial()
> > +                . ",base64=1";
> >              PVE::QemuConfig->write_config($vmid, $conf);
> >  
> >              foreach my $disk (@{ $parsed->{disks} }) {
> > diff --git a/src/PVE/QemuServer.pm b/src/PVE/QemuServer.pm
> > index 545758dc..a8cc7d85 100644
> > --- a/src/PVE/QemuServer.pm
> > +++ b/src/PVE/QemuServer.pm
> > @@ -8086,6 +8086,12 @@ sub generate_smbios1_uuid {
> >      return "uuid=" . generate_uuid();
> >  }
> >  
> > +sub generate_smbios1_serial {
> > +    my @population = ('0' .. '9', 'A' .. 'Z', 'a' .. 'z');
> > +    my $serial = join('', map($population[rand(@population)], 1 .. 12));
> > +    return "serial=" . encode_base64($serial, "");
> > +}
> > +
> >  sub create_reboot_request {
> >      my ($vmid) = @_;
> >      open(my $fh, '>', "/run/qemu-server/$vmid.reboot")  
> 
> 
> 
> 
>