The uuidgen command, by means of the uuidgen syscall, generates one
or more Universally Unique Identifiers compatible with OSF/DCE 1.1
version 1 UUIDs.
From the Perforce logs (change 11995):
Round of cleanups:
o Give uuidgen() the correct prototype in syscalls.master
o Define struct uuid according to DCE 1.1 in sys/uuid.h
o Use struct uuid instead of uuid_t. The latter is defined
in sys/uuid.h but should not be used in kernel land.
o Add snprintf_uuid(), printf_uuid() and sbuf_printf_uuid()
to kern_uuid.c for use in the kernel (currently geom_gpt.c).
o Rename the non-standard struct uuid in kern/kern_uuid.c
to struct uuid_private and give it a slightly better definition
for better byte-order handling. See below.
o In sys/gpt.h, fix the broken uuid definitions to match the now
compliant struct uuid definition. See below.
o In usr.bin/uuidgen/uuidgen.c catch up with struct uuid change.
A note about byte-order:
The standard failed to provide a non-conflicting and
unambiguous definition for the binary representation. My initial
implementation always wrote the timestamp as a 64-bit little-endian
(2s-complement) integral. The clock sequence was always written
as a 16-bit big-endian (2s-complement) integral. After a good
nights sleep and couple of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters (not
necessarily in that order :-) I reread the spec and came to the
conclusion that the time fields are always written in the native
by order, provided the the low, mid and hi chopping still occurs.
The spec mentions that you "might need to swap bytes if you talk
to a machine that has a different byte-order". The clock sequence
is always written in big-endian order (as is the IEEE 802 address)
because its division is resulting in bytes, making the ordering
unambiguous.
