Bug 6404

Summary:	Buildroot's coreutils 'uname -p' reports 'Unknown' on recent ARM kernels
Product:	buildroot	Reporter:	D. Price <daniel.price+buildrootbz>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	unassigned
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX
Severity:	normal	CC:	buildroot
Priority:	P5
Version:	2013.05
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Host:		Target:
Build:

Description D. Price 2013-08-01 04:30:25 UTC

Buildroot's coreutils uname(1) command has a special patch applied as part of buildroot.  When you run 'uname -p', it tries to print out extended information about the processor you are running.  It does this by parsing /proc/cpuinfo.  I'm not sure of the provenance of this enhancement, but you can read the code in package/coreutils/coreutils-uname.patch.

However, on recent ARM kernels, the format of /proc/cpuinfo has changed incompatibly.  Several packages subsequently break.  I believe the commit in question is this: http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=82b5df7bf27ca6cf642499bc3bcae1c93b9ac4ba

So, I recently discovered that when matched with recent ARM kernels, uname -p on buildroot is simply reporting 'Unknown'.  I'm not really sure what the right answer might be.  The code doesn't really seem set up to parse the /proc/cpuinfo file in more than one way.

I am presently using buildroot 2012.11, but the code seems to be the same in the latest release as well.

Comment 1 Thomas Petazzoni 2013-10-30 22:30:53 UTC

This really is a coreutils upstream problem. Could you report this directly to the coreutils developers? On Buildroot side, I believe we should drop coreutils-uname.patch since it's really a feature patch, and it apparently has no chance of making its way to the upstream.

Another option is to look for an updated version of this patch somewhere.