Add a personality to report 2.6.x version numbers
I ran into a couple of programs which broke with the new Linux 3.0 version. Some of those were binary only. I tried to use LD_PRELOAD to work around it, but it was quite difficult and in one case impossible because of a mix of 32bit and 64bit executables. For example, all kind of management software from HP doesnt work, unless we pretend to run a 2.6 kernel. $ uname -a Linux svivoipvnx001 3.0.0-08107-g97cd98f #1062 SMP Fri Aug 12 18:11:45 CEST 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux $ hpacucli ctrl all show Error: No controllers detected. $ rpm -qf /usr/sbin/hpacucli hpacucli-8.75-12.0 Another notable case is that Python now reports "linux3" from sys.platform(); which in turn can break things that were checking sys.platform() == "linux2": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664564 It seems pretty clear to me though it's a bug in the apps that are using '==' instead of .startswith(), but this allows us to unbreak broken programs. This patch adds a UNAME26 personality that makes the kernel report a 2.6.40+x version number instead. The x is the x in 3.x. I know this is somewhat ugly, but I didn't find a better workaround, and compatibility to existing programs is important. Some programs also read /proc/sys/kernel/osrelease. This can be worked around in user space with mount --bind (and a mount namespace) To use: wget ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/ak/uname26/uname26.c gcc -o uname26 uname26.c ./uname26 program Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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