Re:The future of 32-bit Linux
by LoveMortuus on Saturday December 05, 2020 @06:23AM
(#25313686)
Is this correct? 32-bit will be dead in 2038? This is making me really concerned... Won't it just loop around? I still use a 32-bit laptop as my main writing PC... Acer Aspire One, from the age of netbooks. Even finding an up-to-date Linux distro was kinda hard... Is there a fix for the time_t?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
The article has noted the kernel will be fine, but if I read that correctly, glib still uses 32bit time_t. And I thought I saw somewhere ext4 was changed to be fine until sometime around 2160 due to seconds granularity. I wonder how much this is a function of "never break user space." ?
The BSDs have no problem with breaking user space, Net/OpenBSD has been using 64bit time_t for a while. And starting with 6.8 OpenBSD's default file system uses 64bit timestamps.
With that said, I think Linux's "never break user space" is one of the main reasons Linux is so dominant. And that is making the time_t work harder to complete.
User space doesn't generally deal well with time going backwards, but the main problem is that setting an absolute timeout in a program is broken when the target time is less than the current time. An example of this is 32-bit systemd, which just hangs at boot when the RTC points to a time after 2038, as it tries to figure out of timers work.
https://www.adelielinux.org/ is an example of a Linux distro built on musl-1.2, so you can use that beyond 2038 on 32-bit hardware.
Just set your clock to that time and watch what happens.
Re:The future of 32-bit Linux
by core-questions on Saturday December 05, 2020 @12:03PM
(#25316090)
https://askubuntu.com/a/299489
> No, it will not fail. In the worst case, from the viewpoint of a programmer it will work as expected: it will be reseted to date 1901-12-13 20:45:52:
Read the article. TLDR: this has been fixed in code, at least in Linux.
This said, I hope you don’t really plan to be still using that thing in 18 years’ time.
Re:The future of 32-bit Linux
by LoveMortuus on Saturday December 05, 2020 @03:54PM
(#25318244)
Thank you.
For writing it's still amazing and if it still works in 18 that would be amazing, I did just buy a bigger longer battery via eBay! I don't know why but the keyboard feels so amazing... It's like a part of me, I don't even need to think of typing yet the words still appear! I've also put SSD storage into it and upgraded the RAM... It really just makes me very happy