Re: Proposal: Simplify or Remove Compiler Version Details from Kernel Banner

"Enji Cooper (yaneurabeya)" <[email protected]> Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:05:59 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.os.freebsd.devel.hackers
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

> On Mar 13, 2026, at 5:12 AM, Dimitry Andric <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On 13 Mar 2026, at 12:07, Haowu Ge(葛豪武) <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>    Given that FreeBSD now exclusively uses Clang, the full compiler version string—particularly the part containing the GitHub URL—originally introduced to support GCC/Clang coexistence,
> 
> You can still compile FreeBSD with gcc, if you want. The compiler version string inserted into the kernel's banner is simply the first line of "$CC -v" output. The linker version string is handled similarly.
> 
> The way clang prints its version information is determined by upstream, see https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/clang/lib/Basic/Version.cpp.
> 
> The FreeBSD version of clang uses almost the same format as upstream, except for the following differences:
> * We set CLANG_VENDOR to "FreeBSD".
> * We use the "git describe" version of the commit hash, since it is more informative than a long string of hex digits.

Hi Haowu!
	As Dimiitry noted, the compiler, git revision, etc, information has debug/diagnostic benefit to folks trying to support FreeBSD (developers, release engineers, etc).
	Is there a reason why you want to remove this information? It can be tuned via sys/conf/newvers.sh (that’s what $work does with their forked version of FreeBSD), but that interface is admittedly pretty clunky to customize.
Cheers,
-Enji

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