CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linux
Vijay
Vijay

Reputation: 155

Basics of Linux kernel versioning string

I was playing around with uname -a command and i got a doubt with the info it is dumping in the console:

Linux 2.6.32 #1 SMP Mon May 25 18:37:58 PDT 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Google gave me answers for all except '#1' near SMP. I have also seen various numbers like #5 , #23 etc. Does that has any significance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 329

Answers (1)

Random832
Random832

Reputation: 39000

The same string exists as /proc/sys/kernel/version.

The proc(5) manpage states:

This file contains a string like:

#5 Wed Feb 25 21:49:24 MET 1998

The "#5" means that this is the fifth kernel built from this source base and the date behind it indicates the time the kernel was built.

This string is ultimately defined in the mkcompile_h build script. There, you can see that in addition to the version number and date stamp, it can contain SMP and/or PREEMPT to indicate the kernel was built with these options. The version number in .version is initialized or incremented in Makefile in 2.6, and was eventually moved to link-vmlinux.sh.

Upvotes: 4

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