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SubjectHow to retrieve version from kernel source (the right way)?
Hi all.

(Please CC: me, I'm not subscribed - although I'm following the list
through gmane.org)

I'm working on Madwifi (a driver for wireless lan cards with Atheros
chipset), which isn't part of the kernel (and probably won't ever be due
to the binary-only HAL). As every third-party device driver madwifi
needs to know which kernel version it is compiled for, at least for
determining the proper location to install itself after compilation.
But... what is the right way to do this?

We used to get the kernel version via "uname -r", but dropped that
behaviour. Chances are good that one wants to build the driver for a
kernel version other than the currently running kernel.

Then we started to grep VERSION, PATCHLEVEL, SUBLEVEL and EXTRAVERSION
from the kernel's Makefile. This failed, since some distributors seem to
use shell commands for at least one of those. Example from SuSE 9.1:
=== cut ===
VERSION = 2
PATCHLEVEL = 6
SUBLEVEL = 5
EXTRAVERSION = -$(shell echo $(CONFIG_RELEASE)-$(CONFIG_CFGNAME))
=== cut ===

Newer kernels also allow to set CONFIG_LOCALVERSION in .config.

It seems that include/linux/version.h holds the complete version
information in UTS_RELEASE. Is it reliable to get the information from
version.h? Or is there any other preferred method for this?

Bye, Mike
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