Linux 5.1 Continues The Years-Long Effort Preparing For Year 2038

Linux 5.1 continues the massive undertaking in preparing the kernel for the Year 2038 problem.

The Linux kernel has been seeing "Y2038" work for years and the effort is far from over. Thomas Gleixner sent in the latest Y2038 work for the Linux 5.1 kernel, which after a lot of ground work in previous kernels has introduced the first set of syscalls that are Year 2038 safe. Those syscalls include:

clock_gettime64
clock_settime64
clock_adjtime64
clock_getres_time64
clock_nanosleep_time64
timer_gettime64
timer_settime64
timerfd_gettime64
timerfd_settime64
utimensat_time64
pselect6_time64
ppoll_time64
io_pgetevents_time64
recvmmsg_time64
mq_timedsend_time64
mq_timedreceiv_time64
semtimedop_time64
rt_sigtimedwait_time64
futex_time64
sched_rr_get_interval_time64

The Year 2038 problem is where the Unix time can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer and thus after 19 January 2038 will begin wrapping around as a negative number for representing the number of seconds since 1 January 1970.

The Y2038 material for Linux 5.1 is staged via this pull request.