Messages in this thread |  | | From | Jim Nance <> | Subject | Jiffies Wraparound (was Re: interrupt counts) (fwd) | Date | Tue, 20 Aug 1996 07:10:08 -0400 (EDT) |
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Forwarded message: > From: mlord <mlord@pobox.com> > Newsgroups: linux.dev.kernel > Subject: Jiffies Wraparound (was Re: interrupt counts) > Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 21:57:35 -0400
> Jon Lewis wrote: > > > > Just out of curiosity, what's going to happen in about 2 months when my > > irq 11 counter hits 4294967296? Will it happily wrap, or are things > > likely to get upset? > > The one that really worries me is having the "jiffies" wrap around, > an event which will happen every 17 months or so on production systems. > > A *lot* of the kernel will malfunction when that happens.
Its not supposed to break anything, but I doubt it has ever been tested. Something that might be interesting is to compile a kernel with the counter pre-initialized so that it will overflow in about 5 minutes. Then some network connections, compilers, etc. could be started up, and we could see what happened when it overflowed.
Jim
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