I think the key thing that v2 missed was in letting linuxbios set the 'boot success' flag. That flag should only be set by a payload or even linux. It's not really useful to know that linuxbios came up. What matters is that the payload came up. It was a big headache to me, esp. on 1000 nodes, when linuxbios came up, said "boot normal is fine', and loaded a payload which locked up.
So, at this point, I'd argue that linuxbios can CLEAR the boot normal, but the only thing that should set it is a payload. This is very conservative behaviour, but I think it's correct.
And, yes, if CMOS is messed up, zero it, try a normal boot, come around if that fails.
n:m mappings for all modules, well, we don't have lots of bits. Let's not get too fancy. We're not even coming up yet.
ron