DMTF profiles¶

Version Comparison¶

Version comparison is based on different approach than in Software Inventory Profile where the following properties are present to uniquely specify package version:

• uint16 MajorVersion
• uint16 MinorVersion
• uint16 RevisionNumber
• uint16 BuildNumber

And also a VersionString property which is a composition of previous ones separated with dots.

Unfortunately versioning of RPM packages is incompatible with this scheme. Version of RPM package is composed of following properties:

• uint32 Epoch
• string Version
• string Release

Where Version and Release can contain arbitrary set of characters [1]. These attributes were added to LMI_SoftwareIdentity class and will be filled for every RPM package. On the other hand MajorVersion, MinorVersion, RevisionNumber and BuildNumber will not be filled.

This implementation composes VersionString in following way:

<Epoch>:<Version>-<Release>.<Architecture>

The algorithm for comparing two RPM package versions is following:

1. Compare the Epoch (which is a number) of both packages. The one with higher epoch is newer. If they match, continue to point 2.
2. Compare their Version attributes with rpmvercmp algorithm. Package with larger Version (according to rpmvercmp) is newer. If they match, continue to point 3.
3. Compare their Release attributes with rpmvercmp algorithm. Package with larger Release string is newer. Otherwise packages have the same version.

Relationships between Software Identity and Managed Element¶

are not modeled. RPM package database does not provide such informations that would allow to associate particular package with a piece of hardware it relates to.

Querying for packages¶

Since enumeration of Software Identities is disabled due to a huge amount of data generated by large package database, the query execution on them is also disallowed [2]. The only way how to search for packages is using the method LMI_SoftwareInstallationService.FindIdentity.

Example¶

Take for example package vim-enhanced installed on Fedora 18:

$ yum info vim-enhanced
Installed Packages
Name        : vim-enhanced
Arch        : x86_64
Epoch       : 2
Version     : 7.4.027
Release     : 2.fc18
Size        : 2.1 M
Repo        : installed
From repo   : updates-testing

The output has been shortened. This package is represented by an instance of LMI_SoftwareIdentity with InstanceID equal to:

LMI:LMI_SoftwareIdentity:vim-enhanced-2:7.4.027-2.fc18.x86_64

RPM package verification¶

Software Inventory and Softare Update profiles don’t allow for software verification. That is quite useful and desired operation done on RPM packages. Following additions are provided for this purpose.

Following classes have been added:

LMI_SoftwareIdentityFileCheck

Represents single file contained and installed by RPM package. It contains properties allowing for comparison of installed file attributes with those stored in a package database. In case those attributes do not match, file fails the verification test.

LMI_SoftwareIdentityChecks

Associates Software Identity File Check to corresponding Software Identity.

Following methods have been added:

LMI_SoftwareInstallationService.VerifyInstalledIdentity

This allows to run verification test on particular Software Identity and returns a list of files that failed.

Package searching¶

On modern Linux distributions we have thousands of software packages available for installation making it nearly impossible for CIMOM to enumerate them all because it consumes a lot of resources. That’s why the EnumerateInstances() and EnumerateInstanceNames() calls have been disabled Software Identities. As a consequence the ExecQuery() call is prohibited as well.

But the ability to search for packages is so important that a fallback solution has been provided. Method FindIdentity() has been added to LMI_SoftwareInstallationService allowing to create complex queries on package database.