Comment 5 for bug 1661693

Neil,
I could work with family if I had too. Its less than ideal.
The kernel populates some from the smbios into /sys, but apparently 'Family' is not one of those.

I launched a system with xml like yours above, which renders qemu cmdline like:
 -smbios "type=1,manufacturer=Smoser Foo,family=Brightbox Cloud"

From the inside, dmidecode *does* show me the family as you show above (sudo dmidecode --type system).
However, family is not available with either:
  dmidecode --string=SOME_ARGUMENT
nor is it available in /sys/class/dmi/id/ . So I'd have to run dmidecode and parse its output or otherwise implement a dmi/smbios reader.

An ideal value is something that the kernel exposes, that you can see with:
  $ sudo grep -r . /sys/class/dmi/id