With Approaching Another Year Closer To Year 2038, Linux 5.5 Brings More Y2038 Fixes

[schmidtbag]

Hope you have enough cocoa stored, it's only the 19th it will happen. And 19 days inside without fresh air is bad for your constitution

Ah, well, I guess I'll stay in on the 19th then lol.

[S.Pam]

Do we expect by 2038 most embedded systems to still be 32 bit? And who will fix the Year 403207347832 issue?

Highly likely. At work (automotive industry) our machines have a life time of 15 years. Y2038 is actually really close since we need to start thinking on how we buy machines today...

[CommunityMember]

Do we expect by 2038 most embedded systems to still be 32 bit?

It is not at all unusual that embedded/instrumentation devices and/or their OS are used for many decades (if you look hard enough you can probably find some system in some back corner of some industrial plant running Banyan VINES). And while some companies may have explicit life cycle replacement processes, for others it can be hard to justify replacing some PLC in some back room that just monitors the water pressure to the loo even if you remember it is there (and there are a lot of such embedded devices that people forget about). Will all of them be impacted? Perhaps not. But some will likely fall over in strange ways.

[Raka555]

Who thought it was a good idea to store time as a signed integer ...
We should be having a 2106 problem and not a 2038 one ...

[GI_Jack]

Are there any plans to deprecate i686 support? I'd love to see x86 getting dropped entirely.

This isn't about 32 bit intel. Its about ARM, and other low power embedded architectures.

And yes, I still expect to see 32-bit being in use in the future. Even RISC-V has a 32 bit implementation, and for the base low end processors that often consume milliwatts and cost under $1 to the manufacturer, there is little reason for anything else. Expect many of these devices to be installed, and run in production for years or decades without any updates. It is really hard to tell sometimes what larger system might end up relying on them, or how far past its expected end of service life they might run.

Mitigating the 2038 bug completely, as soon as possible, is a wise decision.

In case anyone is wondering about the Y2K bug? It was dead serious and real. It almost actually did cause the financial industry to crash. The only reason it didn't is a herculean effort by companies and developers to patch old systems. Anyone with any COBOL experience ate really well in the 90s, with stories of devs getting paid upwards of $300k/year, in 1990s dollars(about $500k in today's dollars) to fix the issue.

[Raka555]

People seem to forget that even an 8-bit system can handle a uint64_t just fine. It's just a bit slower to handle.
You don't need to drop an entire architecture just because time_t was defined 32 bit and not 64 bit.

[CommunityMember]

Who thought it was a good idea to store time as a signed integer

Well, that would likely be either Dennis Ritchie and/or Ken Thompson back in the late 1960's, when they started working on their experimental OS because Multics was not sufficiently flexible.

I suppose one could boycott Unix (and its derivatives) and the C programming language (and their other contributions), on the principal the creators did not imagine that what they started as a research project would still be in use 60+ years later. That will show them!

[Raka555]

I suppose one could boycott Unix (and its derivatives) and the C programming language (and their other contributions), on the principal the creators did not imagine that what they started as a research project would still be in use 60+ years later. That will show them!

The question is why would you want time_t that can go negative? You can make that mistake in any language.

[CommunityMember]

The question is why would you want time_t that can go negative? You can make that mistake in any language.

Perhaps because things happened before Jan 1st, 1970 (the zero epoch), and you wanted a way to be able to represent them?

[franglais125]

We'll be dead long before 403207347832.

Speak for yourself! I'm an optimist. Wait, either that or delusional, can't remember which.