Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/2] hvmloader: remove timestamp from smbios

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 03.02.15 at 17:02, <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> 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.
> 
> I agree with the sentiment, but this is not how to do it.
> 
> A release date is part of the SMBIOS spec, and the change below results
> in a malformed smbios table (stale p->release_date_str = 3; pointer)
> 
> A better approach would be to derive the date from the commit date of
> HEAD, which would be consistent across rebuilds.

Except that this information may not be available, and isn't really
relevant. Instead I'd suggest using the source time stamp of
smbios.c, as that's really the (almost) only thing controlling the
data presented to the guest.

Or maybe - considering that git checkouts use the current time
for file timestamps rather than the last modification time - use
HEAD's if available, and fall back to smbios.c's otherwise.

Jan


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