Messages in this thread | | | From | Arnd Bergmann <> | Subject | Re: RFD: x32 ABI system call numbers | Date | Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:14:54 +0200 |
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On Tuesday 30 August 2011, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > On 08/30/2011 05:09 AM, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > > > I'm wondering about the time_t changes: given that we are still adding > > new 32 bit architectures, should we change the asm-generic API as well > > to use 64 bit time_t by default (with fallbacks for the existing ones)? > > > > If you are adding support for these in x32 already, we could use the > > same code for regular 32 bit architectures. > > > > It seems absolutely boggling insane that we're introducing new > architectures with no legacy whatsoever and use 32-bit time_t on those.
Ok, but I think we do need to consider the potential problems in this. I would expect a number of things to break if we just define it to 'long long' on new architectures, including:
* pre-c99 C compilers or programs that rely on --std=c89 * padding in struct timespec when you have a long long tv_sec and 32-bit long tv_nsec. This might cause kernel stack data leakage in some kernel interfaces when they don't clear the padding. * random broken applications assuming that timespec/timeval has two 'long' members, instead of using the proper header files.
Obviously these are all fixable for any new ABI, but will cause some annoyance.
I've added a few people to Cc who are in various stages of the process to finalize their upstream kernel ports. It's clearly the right decision to have time_t 64-bit eventually, the question is how much work is everyone willing to spend in the short run, and who is going to test it. In particular, openrisc has just been merged, so we should not be changing it any more unless there is a serious problem, but if there is not much legacy user space with the current ABI yet, it may still be worth switching over.
Arnd
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