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Re: Fourth draft of the Y2038 design document
- From: Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>
- To: Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb dot de>
- Cc: <libc-alpha at sourceware dot org>, Albert ARIBAUD <albert dot aribaud at 3adev dot fr>, Y2038 <y2038 at lists dot linaro dot org>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2016 14:30:10 +0000
- Subject: Re: Fourth draft of the Y2038 design document
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <20160622005838 dot 60a95c44 dot albert dot aribaud at 3adev dot fr> <4435377 dot 8hJ2GQPYUg at wuerfel>
On Wed, 22 Jun 2016, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> Regarding the "Support for non-Y2038-safe kernels" section, I'm not
> sure if that can work at all: A kernel that does not have the appropriate
> system calls will also not have the handlers for a lot of the ioctl
> commands and possibly other interfaces that rely on a specific
> structure layout. If we can instead enforce that __USE_TIME_BITS64
Maybe it's hard for ioctls, but I see no reason it shouldn't work for
applications using normal non-ioctl glibc interfaces, with runtime
fallbacks in glibc such as have been used for plenty of previous kernel
features.
Of course eventually we remove support for the older kernels - when they
are no longer on the list at https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html
unless something comes up like the issue with people expecting to use new
glibc on old virtualization solutions only supporting 2.6.32 kernels - but
it would be good for people and distributions to be using / testing
_TIME_BITS=64 before they reach the point of ceasing to support any older
kernels.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com