Nico Huber has posted comments on this change. ( https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/47598 )
Change subject: arch/x86: Remove ID_SECTION_OFFSET ......................................................................
Patch Set 2:
See related CB:40376 CB:40377 and CB:47602.
A decision should be made if .id section can be dropped and compatibility with old flashrom (and FILO) builds sacrified with some schedule, 2022 at earliest perhaps. I think post-processing approach would allow removal of id.S independently of that.
In CB:40377 it looked like we could settle for a simple file in CBFS instead. As that's simple enough to do even out-of-tree, I see no problem to remove the section, but also not much of a reason to.
For us, dropping it after 4.15 (in 12 months) should work. If I haven't branched another coreboot for our older platforms until then, it will likely never hap- pen. And even if, we'll have bigger problems than patching this back in ;)
Any reason not to schedule that earlier? I would think that people update their OS/tools more often than their firmware? How old flashrom are we talking?
The tools in our case are baked into the firmware (update process in FILO). No .id, no updates.
I'll have to look into the older discussions to figure out once again why we want to get rid of it at all.
Found this: https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/35035/17/src/arch/x86/memlayout.ld#...
They just wanted to save the space because the .id section wouldn't be readable anyway in a compressed bootblock. If I ever try to port coreboot to any Zen platform, remind me that I wanted to try without bootblock/romstage :)