Growing major version

Posted Feb 16, 2026 2:01 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Growing major version by hallyn
Parent article: The first half of the 7.0 merge window

What is the behavior today of UNAME26? It seems to ignore the major version. Is 4.1 reported the same as 3.1? The docs seem to indicate that it should…

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Growing major version

Posted Feb 16, 2026 7:25 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

The comment at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/... says:

/*
* Work around broken programs that cannot handle "Linux 3.0".
* Instead we map 3.x to 2.6.40+x, so e.g. 3.0 would be 2.6.40
* And we map 4.x and later versions to 2.6.60+x, so 4.0/5.0/6.0/... would be
* 2.6.60.
*/

You can check if you distro does not patch it more with `setarch --uname-2.6 uname -r`. For me, `6.18.9-200.fc43.x86_64` gets mapped to `2.6.78-200.fc43.x86_64`.

Growing major version

Posted Feb 17, 2026 14:22 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Fun, so 4.5 and 5.5 overlap then? Yeah, I think anyone who needed this has since migrated. Of course, those without the ability to recompile may be stuck with oodles of other bugs. And it's not as if they'd be able to care about 4.4 vs. 5.4 without fixing the behavior anyways.