Re: More detailed build infomation in kernels

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <20140723093114.GE977%apb-laptoy.apb.alt.za@localhost>,
Alan Barrett  <apb%cequrux.com@localhost> wrote:
>I have some private patches that append arbitrary additional 
>information to the kernel version string.  Essentially, I pass 
>BUILDINFO="<multi-line message here>" in the environment (through 
>build.sh and the make wrapper), and then a modified version of 
>src/sys/conf/newvers.sh appends it to the value of the "version" 
>variable in the vers.c file that's compiled into the kernel.  I 
>also add the information to /etc/release.
>
>The additional information is exposed in sysctl kern.version, and 
>in {struct utsname}.version as returned by uname(3), and in the 
>output from uname(1) -v.
>
>I use this feature to add infomation about the source tree
>and build date, so I see information like this:
>
>$ sysctl kern.version
>kern.version = NetBSD 6.99.47 (APB)
>fossil repository: apb-local-src.fossil
>fossil tags: local
>fossil commit: 449e51b700 (2014-07-19 15:41:14 UTC)
>fossil comment: merge src from trunk as of 2014-07-19 00:00 UTC
>
>I imagine that it would be useful for official builds to
>include some sort of official statement here.
>
>The multi-line BUILDINFO strings are truncated and folded to a 
>single line by uname(3), which is unhelpful, so I am inclined to 
>store them in a new kernel variable, exposed via a new sysctl 
>node, instead of appending to the existing kernel version 
>variable.  Then the new information would not be exposed by 
>uname(3) or uname(1).
>
>Comments?

Yes, I think that a new sysctl variable would be good.

christos