6.3 uname -a weirdness

[andrew clarke]

On Thu 2009-12-03 14:46:26 UTC+0100, Andrea Venturoli (ml at netfence.it) wrote:

> Now "uname -a" reports 6.3p13, although "cat /usr/src/UPDATING" gives:
> 
> ...
> 20091203:       p14     FreeBSD-SA-09:15.ssl,
> FreeBSD-SA-09:17.freebsd-update
>         Disable SSL renegotiation in order to protect against a serious
>         protocol flaw. [09:15]
> 
>         Fix permissions in freebsd-update in order to prevent leakage of
>         sensitive files. [09:17]
> ...

>From what I understand the version number compiled into the kernel is
retrived from /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh at build time.  Maybe one
of the developers forgot to update this file to p14 for FreeBSD 6.3.
Or perhaps newvers.sh is only updated when the kernel is modified.
But the latter theory does not match my experience on the FreeBSD 7.2
machine I run here:

1:52 ozzmosis at blizzard [~]grep -v # /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh | head 

TYPE="FreeBSD"
REVISION="7.2"
BRANCH="RELEASE-p5"
...

Here, newvers.sh was modified only a few hours ago when I ran
freebsd-update to upgrade from 7.2-REL-p4 to 7.2-REL-p5:

1:58 ozzmosis at blizzard [~]touch x
1:59 ozzmosis at blizzard [~]ls -l /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh x
-rw-r--r-- 1 root     wheel    3795 2009-12-03 21:24 /usr/src/sys/conf/newvers.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 ozzmosis ozzmosis    0 2009-12-04 01:59 x

> I think the above does not affect the kernel;

Yes, I believe ihis is correct for the recent security patches for
7.2.  I saw no kernel modifications (so presumably no need to reboot
the machine).

>  in fact I recompiled it just to be able to check the OS version with
>  uname. Just curious on whether this is normal...

I wonder if the FreeBSD developers would consider it worthwhile to
make it a bit easier to find out what "patch level" the system is at.

"uname -a" only reflects the kernel patch level.  I don't think
there's an unambiguous way to determine the userland patch level.
Most Linux distros use /etc/issue.  Maybe FreeBSD could have something
like that.

Regards
Andrew