Changing the ARM variant reported by 'uname -m'

From: Tuomas Tynkkynen
Date: Wed Oct 18 2017 - 11:07:34 EST


Hi,

For our distro (NixOS), I've experimented with building packages for ARMv6 on ARMv7 hardware. This has generally worked fine, except that some build scripts (in coreutils, for example) notice that `uname -m` returns 'armv7l' and thus decide to e.g. add some ARMv7-specific gcc flags, which makes the binaries not run on actual ARMv6 devices.

So to avoid that, it would be necessary to have a way to make `uname -m` return a different ARM architecture version that the hardware has. After all, there is precedent for doing this: calling personality(PER_LINUX32) turns 'x86_64' to 'i686' and so on for other architectures.

I can see two ways of implementing this:

1) Keep using the personality() call by reserving some PER_* constants for architectures to use and decide what to map them to. E.g. the ARM implementation would require 8 values for choosing one of:
armv4 armv4t armv5t armv5te armv5tej armv6 armv7 armv7m
plus automatically appending 'b' or 'l' depending on endianness.

2) Add a new setmachine() system call that allows setting the machine name to an arbitrary string inside a non-initial UTS namespace.