Hi, removing these properties will not bring almost any benefit (other than making some checks happy any saving some <200 LoC) and will make the lives of almost all people doing independent development for linux-on-msm harder. There are almost unironically like 3 people outside Linaro and QUIC who have non-vendor-fused development boards AND the sources to rebuild the bootloader on their own. Making it harder to boot is only going to discourage people from developing on these devices, which is already not that pleasant, especially with newer platforms where you have to fight with the oh-so-bright ideas of Android boot chain.. This only concerns devices released before sm8350, as the new ones will not even boot with these properties present (or at least SONY Sagami, but I doubt it's an isolated case), so other than completing support for older devices, it won't be an issue going forward, anyway. But there are give or take 50 locked down devices in mainline right now, and many more waiting to be upstreamed in various downstream close-to-mainline trees that should not be disregarded just because Qualcomm is far from the best at making their BSP software stack clean. One solution is to chainload another, (n+1)-stage bootloader, but this is not ideal, as: 1) the stock bootloader can boot Linux just fine on most devices (except for single exceptions, where beloved OEMs didn't implement arm64 booting or something) 2) the boot chain on MSM is already 3- or 4- stage and adding to that will only create an unnecessary mess 3) the job of kernel people is not to break userspace. If the device can not even exit bootloader after a kernel upgrade, it's a big failure. If you *really really really* want these either gone or documented, we can for example use them in the SOCID driver, read the values from DTB and compare against what SMEM has to say and for example print a warning when there are inconsistencies or use it as a fallback when it fails for any reason, such as using a newer SoC on an older kernel, without updates for SOCID read (which are sometimes necessary, which was the case for 8450 recently, iirc). My stance is to just leave them as is, as moving them anywhere, or removing them at all will cause unnecessary mess and waste time that could have been spent on more glaring issues.. Konrad
