Re: Possible bug in uname command

[Paul Eggert]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> What about parsing /proc/cpuinfo, on machines that have that?

That's been discussed, but it sounds like a can of worms.  The
information doesn't map all that well to the uname output, and my
admittedly uninformed feeling is that it is not that standard among
Linux versions.

For example, on a Solaris 10 (sparc) box, uname -a might output this:

SunOS otter 5.10 Generic_118822-11 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440 Solaris

The "sparc" and "SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440" correspond to the --processor and
--hardware-platform options that are unknown on Linux boxes.
/proc/cpuinfo probably would say just "cpu family : 27" or something
like that, which would be a pain to map to an actual name like
"sparc".  (Or perhaps uname could just output the "27"; doesn't sound
that helpful, though.)  And the "SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440" is more of a
motherboard concept than a CPU concept; is there a
/proc/motherboardinfo in Linux?

Maybe if some Linux whiz wanted to maintain it as a nice dropin
library.  But personally I'd rather just have the Linux folks support
this stuff in their system calls; that's where it belongs.