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

[discordian]

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

Funny, that a negative time is an error in *nix (and most other OSes), you don't need to represent any system time that the system cant support. For everything else you will pick an solution that works (stay away from system time unless you need it in other words).

a signed integer could have the advantage of detecting calculation errors, but I am not sure if there were much thoughts spent.

IMHO, the core OS should refrain from using absolute timestamps, just use some unsigned ring arithmetic

isexpired = (targettime - time) < (maxtime / 2)

. No need to care for wraps, timestamps only need to be

< (maxtime / 2)

in the future. the rest are specific issues and solutions that can be better solved with specific solutions. You won't use filesystem timestamps for astronomic calculations after all.

[zxy_thf]

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

It's unlikely to drop IA32 support anytime soon since Intel is still pumping out new IA32-only processors (Atom, Quark) for IoTs.

[pal666]

all devices in the wild have to support kernel updates, otherwise they will be running obsolete broken kernels very soon