I see two possible compromises:
1. copy initram to the start of CAR. I think this is easy and would work just fine. Then we can link initram to CARBASE 2. link initram into stage 0. The issue here is that we lose fallback. Speaking as the only person here who ever reflashed 1023 nodes with a defective bios, I have to say I am fond of fallback. Having fallback saved about 5 days of cracking nodes open and replacing lpc parts. It may have saved my life; I think the guys would have killed me had they had to do the flash replacements. That said, I don't think most people care about fallback, but that said, that's cause we're all hackers. What about end users?
I don't see post-pass links on the lar as a realistic option.
As for ldscipts.. I was asked by an OLPC guy early in the game to tell him how the jump from fallback to normal worked -- where did the symbol get created in the process of building a fallback image? I found the answer. Now I dare anyone on this list to go find it. Not just "it's this linker script". But find the actual place the computation is done and the symbol assigned. Then come back and tell me you like the linker script approach :-)
I vote for (1), myself.
But the fact is, for as long as we unpack a compressed coreboot to RAM, we're going to have at least two stages, whether we call it that or not.
ron