Linux 5.1 Continues The Years-Long Effort Preparing For Year 2038 (phoronix.com)

Linux 5.1 continues the massive undertaking in preparing the kernel for the Year 2038 problem. Phoronix: The Linux kernel has been seeing "Y2038" work for years and the effort is far from over. Thomas Gleixner (a Linux kernel developer who serves as a member of the technical advisory board at The Linux Foundation) 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.

Comments

it seems early but it's not

[Anonymous Coward]

We know from y2k that systems have a long lifetime. Software needs to be fixed well before 2038 to ensure that they work then, especially with Linux in so many embedded systems that make much more use of time data.

Good on them.

Re:it seems early but it's not

[DontBeAMoran]

You may be too late, but I'm not. I've been storing dates as ISO8601 strings for over a decade now, to bypass all the Pre-1970-01-01/Y2000/Y2038 bullshit. All my systems can go from 0000-01-01 to 9999-12-31.

Re:it seems early but it's not

[ceoyoyo]

Y10K bug.

Re:it's too late

[jeff4747]

Ya know, I think you can survive with the timestamp on your CCTV feed having the wrong year.

Problem will hit before 2038

[ardmhacha]

The Y2K bug hit well before the year 2000.

Back in 1990 the company I worked for had a problem when a 10 year contract with scheduled payments was entered into the system in 1990. All the programmers in the company spent weeks working through source code searching for places where dates were stored with a 2 digit year. I assume the Y2038 bug has already hit systems where future dates are used,

Re:Problem will hit before 2038

[twdorris]

It already has. Back in 2006 with some AOLServer code working around an Oracle driver bug of some sort.

http://taint.org/2006/07/20/17...

Re:Problem will hit before 2038

[bill_mcgonigle]

30 year mortgages were being processed in 2007 ... but they're rarely using kernel time_t for any of that. Cron jobs in 2037 might need to worry.

Re:it's too late

[Kjella]

Ya know, I think you can survive with the timestamp on your CCTV feed having the wrong year.

I will, but won't somebody please think of the NSA?

Re:What took you so long?

[Michael Woodhams]

Ditto. I felt smugly superior to be using little-endian DD-MM-YYYY which was so much better (consistent) than the USA's middle-endian MM-DD-YYYY format. Then starting in 1988, my MSc thesis was on an experiment with many Japanese collaborators (they had the money, we had the supernova) and I saw them use YYYY-MM-DD and I was an instant convert. We're already big-endian in our decimal notation, so dates should be too. And in YYYY-MM-DD, chronological order and 'alphabetic' order are the same.

Re:it's too late

[petermgreen]

Routers, TVs, video recorders, CCTVs, and more will be non-functional in 2038. And there is nothing we can do to stop it.

We can't stop todays or yesterdays products from having problems in 2038.

But the sooner this is fixed in the main-line the sooner it will reach the production lines the less effected equipment there will be still in use in 2038.