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

With approaching another year closer to the Year 2038 problem, where on 19 January 2038 the number of seconds for the Unix timestamp can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer, Linux 5.5 is bringing more Y2038 preparations.

Y2038 fixes have been ongoing for years to mitigate the kernel against the Year 2038 problem, particularly for 32-bit platforms. Most of the Year 2038 preparations have been made to the Linux kernel to transition to 64-bit time_t even on 32-bit architectures, among other workarounds.

With Linux 5.5 comes syscall implementation cleanups and other fixes around the support. Besides that main Y2038 pull request, there have been other Y2038 fixes to land too like a fix in the Firewire code among other trees.

So while the kernel is in largely good shape for the Y2038 issue eighteen years ahead of the problem manifesting, it will be another issue of ensuring all devices in the wild are running an updated kernel and other updated software components ahead of 19 January 2038.