@arianvp can you take a look at these occurences, and whether it's good to remove them? Would be nice to be able to clean up some of this for 20.03 ;-)

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The idea to remove systemConfig LGTM.

There are few more occurrences of "systemConfig" across the repo:

a. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/system/boot/loader/init-script/init-script-builder.sh#L52
b. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/system/boot/stage-2-init.sh#L3
c. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/system/activation/activation-script.nix#L72
d. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/system/activation/top-level.nix#L68
e. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/profiles/docker-container.nix#L52

Should systemConfig be removed in those too?

I think a. can be safely removed, because it sets systemConfig for stage-2, but since c4f910f this is directly substituted into stage-2 anyway. This is actually happening at b. and d., which moved a few lines and is now here.

So b. and d are still needed, and work independent of the kernel parameter since that commit.

c. is similar to b.

e. moved here and I think is legitimate use of the systemConfig variable which is set up in c. Independent of this pr it may or may not be appropriate to document (in the configuration.nix man page) that that variable is available to activation scripts (depending on if it should be considered public api).

tl;dr

I think a. should be removed by this pr, while all the other occurrences are not related to the kernel parameter (any more), and should be left as is.

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/prs-ready-for-review/3032/431

@arianvp are you still interested in this?
Somebody else should look over this as well, but I think apart from removing the corresponding line in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/system/boot/loader/init-script/init-script-builder.sh#L52, this change should be fine.