[RFC 00/32] making inode time stamps y2038 ready

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Monday 02 June 2014, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Jun 2014, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> 
> > Ok. Sorry about missing linux-api, I confused it with linux-arch, which
> > may not be as relevant here, except for the one question whether we
> > actually want to have the new ABI on all 32-bit architectures or only
> > as an opt-in for those that expect to stay around for another 24 years.
> 
> For glibc I think it will make the most sense to add the support for 
> 64-bit time_t across all architectures that currently have 32-bit time_t 
> (with the new interfaces having fallback support to implementation in 
> terms of the 32-bit kernel interfaces, if the 64-bit syscalls are 
> unavailable either at runtime or in the kernel headers against which glibc 
> is compiled - this fallback code will of course need to check for overflow 
> when passing a time value to the kernel, hopefully with error handling 
> consistent with whatever the kernel ends up doing when a filesystem can't 
> support a timestamp).  If some architectures don't provide the new 
> interfaces in the kernel then that will mean the fallback code in glibc 
> can't be removed until glibc support for those architectures is removed 
> (as opposed to removing it when glibc no longer supports kernels predating 
> the kernel support).

Ok, that's a good reason to just provide the new interfaces on all
architectures right away. Thanks for the insight!

	Arnd