From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] hvmloader: remove timestamp from vgabios
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2015 16:28:27 +0000
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To: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@suse.com>
Cc: Olaf Hering <olaf@aepfle.de>, Wei Liu <wei.liu2@citrix.com>, Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@eu.citrix.com>, Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>, Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@eu.citrix.com>, xen-devel@lists.xen.org
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On Tue, 2015-02-03 at 16:17 +0000, Jan Beulich wrote:
> >>> On 03.02.15 at 17:06, <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com> wrote:
> > On 03/02/15 15:54, Olaf Hering wrote:
> >> Including a timestamp into the binary makes it impossible to get
> >> reproducible binaries. Remove the timestamp because it carries no
> >> valuable info.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Olaf Hering <olaf@aepfle.de>
> >> Cc: Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@eu.citrix.com>
> >> Cc: Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@eu.citrix.com>
> >> Cc: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>
> >> Cc: Wei Liu <wei.liu2@citrix.com>
> > 
> > In this case, it would appear that the vgabios_date symbol is completely
> > unused inside the binary.  Good riddance!
> 
> Let's hope there are no tools scanning the BIOS image for a date
> string.

That occurred to me too and I forgot to mention it, it looks vaguely
like this stuff is trying to conform to something or other (e.g.
specific offset and some things which look a bit like signatures),
probably some ancient PC spec?

Ian.