What does geeko@buildhost signify in linux version?

Question

On a linux server when checking the Linux version I see the following "geeko@buildhost"

Version:  Linux version 4.12.14-95.54-default (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 4.8.5 (SUSE Linux) ) #1 SMP Thu Jun 4 12:49:28 UTC 2020 (892ef1f)

What does this signify? does it have something to do with who built the os packages?

Answer 1

It is simply an identifier showing the user and host names where the kernel is compiled. The former is the result of executing whoami and the latter is the result of running uname -n. You can see how it is put together in init/version.c:

const char linux_banner[] =
    "Linux version " UTS_RELEASE " (" LINUX_COMPILE_BY "@"
    LINUX_COMPILE_HOST ") (" LINUX_COMPILER ") " UTS_VERSION "\n";

The variables are set by scripts/mkcompile_h:

if test -z "$KBUILD_BUILD_USER"; then
    LINUX_COMPILE_BY=$(whoami | sed 's/\\/\\\\/')
else
    LINUX_COMPILE_BY=$KBUILD_BUILD_USER
fi
if test -z "$KBUILD_BUILD_HOST"; then
    LINUX_COMPILE_HOST=`uname -n`
else
    LINUX_COMPILE_HOST=$KBUILD_BUILD_HOST
fi