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A comment on Devuan considers machine IDs. Parent comment

Re:Devuan considers machine IDs by kazinator on Saturday March 30, 2019 @05:05PM (#19531841)
> it is necessarily something that would live in the filesystem, independent of the kernel.

Counterexample: struct utsname and the uname system call.

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Re:Devuan considers machine IDs by LukeShu on Saturday March 30, 2019 @05:17PM (#19531917)
That's a good counterpoint.

It would still have to live somewhere in the filesystem, and have a userspace program load it in to the kernel, just as `utsname.nodename` is loaded from /etc/hostname.

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Re:Devuan considers machine IDs by kazinator on Saturday March 30, 2019 @10:55PM (#19533481)
Yes; that area of the filesystem can be readable only to root. It could also have other avenues of entry: it could come from the boot firmware via the kernel command line, or be in a device tree blob or whatever.
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