I asked a related question about uname before, now want to ask from another angle because the following simple yet obvious conflicting outputs may mean there is something many people did not think of (me included). I'm running FreeBSD 9 RELEASE, please see the following commands:

# sysctl kern.bootfile
kern.bootfile: /boot/kernel/kernel

# strings /boot/kernel/kernel |grep RELEASE|grep 9
@(#)FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE-p7 #0: Tue Jun  3 11:05:13 UTC 2014
FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE-p7 #0: Tue Jun  3 11:05:13 UTC 2014
9.2-RELEASE-p7

The above kernel file suggests the running kernel is 9.2-RELEASE-p7. But...

# dmesg
Copyright (c) 1992-2012 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
    The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE #0 r243825: Tue Dec  4 09:23:10 UTC 2012
...

# uname -a
FreeBSD localhost.localdomain 9.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE #0 r243825: Tue Dec  4 09:23:10 UTC 2012     [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64

So dmesg and uname says it's 9.1-RELEASE.

I also did an extensive find / -type f -exec grep -l "9.1-RELEASE" {} \; but found no possible kernel file that contains 9.1-RELEASE.

What could lead to the above conflict, and what kernel I am actually running?

Please note I run RELEASE and ran freebsd-update to do binary update, so no compiled kernel is involved. And I have rebooted multiple times after freebsd-update. And the system is not in jail etc, just the only system on that computer.