Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 20 Jun 2013 14:34:59 +0200 | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] timekeeping: handle epoch roll-over (2038) on 32-bit systems |
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* Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Jun 2013, John Stultz wrote: > > On 06/03/2013 07:34 AM, Thomas Gleixner wrote: > > > Though even if we fix that we still need to twist our brains around > > > the timespec/timeval based user space interfaces. That's going to be > > > the way more interesting challenge. > > > > I'm curious if there are any there other ideas that folks are considering? > > Honestly, we have almost 25 years ahead of us to solve that. So why > hurry? If Tobias thinks that his embedded system of today needs to > survive 2038 without updating the kernel and all of userspace, then > all I can do is wish him good luck. Albeit we should not waste 25 > years and run into another Y2K horror. :) > > The only solid solution is to implement a new set of syscalls (and > there are not that many which are affected by this). The new syscalls > should use a nanosecond based scalar time value and get rid of the > timespec /timeval / time_t nonsense alltogether. That reduces the > number of new syscalls significantly. > > That time value should be 64bit, also people might argue, that we are > creating a new issue for the year 2554, i.e 541 years from now. I > don't think we need to worry about that really. We have to leave our > grand-grand-grand..grandchildren (~20 generations from now) a few > unsolved problems! > > The evil plan to make this happen looks like this: > > 1) Convert the core code to u64 with a timespec based shadow > infrastruture to avoid performance regressions in the first > place. > > 2) Add new u64 based syscalls > > 3) Disable the timespec based shadow infrastructure five years > from now to force all lazy buggers who ignored the new syscalls > to fix their crap. > > 4) Deprecate the old syscalls 10 years from now > > 5) Remove the old syscalls 100 years from now so Linus won't hunt > us for breaking userspace :)
50 years from now should be enough for most of us - beyond that there will be no hunting, only haunting ... ;-)
Thanks,
Ingo
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