Unix System Information – How to Find Machine Details

So I'm not sure if you're looking to do this programmatically or not. But the first step you'd need to accomplish this is a database that catalogues all of this sort of information for each distribution and their respective releases.

Luckily… that is exactly what distrowatch.com is.

You can gather this information using their advanced search page, which has a cool feature that allows you to search for distribution releases that include a specific version of a package. In this case, you're interested in the linux package.

Searching for a specific version of that package (which corresponds to the kernel version) will give you a nice list of distributions followed by the releases of that distribution that ship with that package version.

I don't know of any DistroWatch API, so if you need to do this programmatically, you'll probably have to do some html parsing. But the format for the query to generate the results page for a given kernel version would be as follows:

distrowatch.com/search.php?pkg=linux&pkgver=VERSION&distrorange=InAny#pkgsearch

Play around with that, and you might be able to get a nice little tool to do exactly what you're trying to do. If anyone knows of a better way to search DistroWatch's Database, please chime in. It'd be really nice, since they have such a treasure-trove of information.

There is no a portable, reliable, generic method to retrieve hardware model name in Linux. Let me describe 2 different cases: ARM-based Raspberry Pi with Raspbian installed and MIPS-based TP-LINK router with OpenWRT installed.

Raspberry Pi has an ARM CPU and ARM devices commonly use device-tree to describe hardware and Wikipedia article even mentions that it's mandatory since 2012. Device-tree structure is exposed to userspace and can be used for retrieving a model name by cating /proc/device-tree/model where /proc/device-tree itself is a symlink to /sys/firmware/devicetree/base like that (notice that there is no newline at the end of the device-tree files so we create a helper function called catn that cats the file and adds a newline):

pi@raspberrypi:~$ catn () { cat $1 && echo; }
pi@raspberrypi:~$ catn /proc/device-tree/model
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
pi@raspberrypi:~$ catn /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2

or by manually dumping /sys/firmware/fdt flattened device-tree blob with dtc:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo dtc /sys/firmware/fdt 2>/dev/null | grep model
    compatible = "raspberrypi,3-model-b\0brcm,bcm2837";
    model = "Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2";

If an official Raspberry Pi Linux fork is in use model is also written to /proc/cpuinfo:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ grep "^Model" /proc/cpuinfo
Model           : Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2

Also notice that the full name of the board - Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 is constructed by low-level firmware and that you will not find a full string like that anywhere in the Linux kernel code:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ strings /boot/start.elf  | grep 'Raspberry Pi '
Raspberry Pi %s Rev %s
Raspberry Pi Bootcode

model is a standard device-tree property described in the DTSpec.

Other architectures such as RISC-V also use device tree to describe hardware but I don't have any RISC-V board to check.

There is no /proc/device-tree, no /sys/firmware/devicetree/base and no /sys/firmware/fdt on my TP-LINK router - it means that it either doesn't come with device-tree at all or that some appropriate Linux kernel config options have been disabled and device-tree is not exposed to the userspace. The former is, however, more likely as there is /tmp/sysinfo instead:

~ $ cat /tmp/sysinfo/board_name
tl-wdr4300
~ $ cat /tmp/sysinfo/model
TP-Link TL-WDR3600 v1

These values are generated by ar71xx.sh script which is rather long but you can see that name is assigned in line 1313:

*"TL-WDR3600/4300/4310")
        name="tl-wdr4300"
    ;;

based on TL-WDR4900 v2 which is in turn taken from machine field from /proc/cpuinfo:

machine=$(awk 'BEGIN{FS="[ \t]+:[ \t]"} /machine/ {print $2}' /proc/cpuinfo)

and is then assigned to AR71XX_BOARD_NAME and written to /tmp/sysinfo/board_name by the end of the script.

The full value of machine field in /proc/cpuinfo on this router is:

~ $ grep "^machine" /proc/cpuinfo
machine                 : TP-LINK TL-WDR3600/4300/4310

But Neofetch is not looking for /tmp/sysinfo/board_name, it's looking for /tmp/sysinfo/model. It's not taken from /proc/cpuinfo but read from the firmware flash partition:

~ $ cat /proc/mtd
dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 00020000 00010000 "u-boot"
mtd1: 0010c5a4 00010000 "kernel"
mtd2: 006c3a5c 00010000 "rootfs"
mtd3: 00490000 00010000 "rootfs_data"
mtd4: 00010000 00010000 "art"
mtd5: 007d0000 00010000 "firmware"
~ $ dd if=/dev/mtdblock5 bs=4 count=1 skip=16 2>/dev/null | hexdump -v -n 4 -e '1/1 "%02x"'  && echo
36000001

Model is assigned in line 321:

"360000"*)
    model="TP-Link TL-WDR3600"
    ;;

Of course it's hard to imagine that a generic program such as Neofetch would have so much knowledge about each firmware, its flash layout etc. I could however imagine a MIPS-based implementation that wouldn't support device-tree and wouldn't provide any useful hardware model information in /tmp/sysinfo and anywhere else and in such cases /proc/cpuinfo could be used as a last resort to get any information about hardware.