Hi Peter,
long story short: AFAICT it's a deprecated or moved configuration entry inside the file /etc/machine-info and should be safe to just delete, maybe even with the whole file machine-info itself.
On my machine with openrc and systemd-boot I don't even have /etc/machine-info at all and things work fine together. To me it looks as
the variable was just thrown out of the machine-info file and in case you would need it you should put it into /etc/kernel/install.conf.
I don't know which software uses the string. If you compile your kernel manually or using the gentoo-kernel packages it seems to be not necessary.
(But as always when taking advice from strangers on the internet: First make a backup, have a live medium for recovery at hand and test it yourself.)
Looking more carefully, I see only one machine has an /etc/machine-info.
Sysop: | Keyop |
---|---|
Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
Users: | 546 |
Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
Uptime: | 146:12:46 |
Calls: | 10,383 |
Calls today: | 8 |
Files: | 14,054 |
D/L today: |
2 files (1,861K bytes) |
Messages: | 6,417,699 |