bug#70298: uname -i returns unknown since fedora 38

[Collin Funk]

On 4/9/24 12:57 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Indeed there is, and I merged your bug report into that old one. It'd be nice 
> if someone could get to the bottom of that bug.

I decided to look into this a bit, since I also have an unknown
'uname -i' and 'uname -p'.

It seems that this option is a Solaris thing. I found the commit that
it was introduced [1]. It also adds some other Solaris compatibility
stuff, so everything seems to add up so far.

The first function it tries is sysinfo (SI_PLATFORM, ...) which seems
to be a Solaris thing [2]. I think Linux has sysinfo but not
SI_PLATFORM.

Then it tries sysctl (...) with a UNAME_HARDWARE_PLATFORM macro to deal
with the BSDs. I think OpenBSD might be missing that definition in the
#ifdef, but I have no way of testing it at the moment [3].

I'm not sure if 'uname -i', 'uname -p', or 'uname -m' are supposed to
be any different from each other. Maybe someone who knows Solaris can
help more?

Illumios defines 'sysinfo' as an alias to 'systeminfo' [4]. There it
returns an 'extern char *platform' in the given buffer when passed
SI_PLATFORM [5]. I've found the definition of the variable, but I
don't know where it is actually set to something useful [6]. Hopefully
that information helps someone...

[1] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=aaeb7a61c4662fd28cf2bc161b740352711538d2
[2] 
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/cf618897f43ea305e3a426f93bbcef4e8106829c/usr/src/uts/common/sys/systeminfo.h#L86
[3] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/uname.c#n36
[4] 
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/master/usr/src/lib/libc/common/sys/sysinfo.S
[5] 
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/cf618897f43ea305e3a426f93bbcef4e8106829c/usr/src/uts/common/syscall/systeminfo.c#L124
[6] 
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/master/usr/src/uts/common/conf/param.c#L533

Collin