How does /usr/bin/uname work in plain english?

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 8:22 PM bob prohaska <fbsd at www.zefox.net> wrote:

> Since the switch to git I've been wondering how /usr/bin/uname works.
> The man page is thin on details and uname.c is far too subtle.
>
> For example, on my test box uname -a reports
> FreeBSD www.zefox.org 13.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT #7
> main-c255937-g818390ce0ca5: Wed Jan 13 16:42:12 PST 2021
>  bob at www.zefox.org:/usr/obj/usr/freebsd-src/arm64.aarch64/sys/GENERIC-MMCCAM
> arm64
> which seems to replay git nomeclature.
>
> However, uname -KU reports
> 1300135 1300134
> which is admirably readable, even for me.
>
> Is there a natural language description detailing  how
> uname -KU outputs are computed, and roughly what they mean?
> I've noticed that different sources sometimes produce the
> same values, so the level of detail is less, but might suffice
> for initial reports to the mailing lists.
>

__FreeBSD_version is defined in sys/param.h. For -U, uname prints that
value. For -K, it asks the kernel for this value to print.

MMmmnnn where MM is the major version, mm is minor, and nnn is incremental
when the APIs change, approximately weekly.

Warner

Thanks for reading,
>
> bob prohaska
>
>
>
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