Linux is ready for the end of time

guest · Feb 16, 2020

Linux is ready for the end of time
...fixes are underway to make sure all goes well when that fatal time rolls around
February 13, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-is-ready-for-the-end-of-time/

On 03:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, aka Coordinated Universal Time) January 19, 2038 (that's a Tuesday), the world ends. Well, not in the biblical Book of Revelations sense. But, what will happen is the value for time in 32-bit based Unix-based operating systems, like Linux and older versions of macOS, runs out of numbers and starts counting time with negative numbers. That's not good.

But, since Unix and family started out as 32-bit operating systems, time's value is kept as a single signed 32-bit integer number. Those are a lot of seconds, but just like the last century's Y2K bug, it's not enough.
Linux developers have seen this coming for decades. So, Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann and others have been working on a repair.

These corrections are now in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel. Bergmann explained, "Linux-5.6, or my backport of the patches to 5.4, should be the first release that can serve as a base for a 32-bit system designed to run beyond year 2038."
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There are some caveats: [...]
In short, there's a lot of clean-up work to be done even after the core problem has been fixed.

Now, you may be wondering -- since we're all running 64-bit computers these days -- why is this even an issue. Well, it's like this. First, many embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are still running 32-bit operating systems. Indeed, by 2038, there will probably still be new 32-bit devices arriving in the market.
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guest · Oct 18, 2020

XFS File-System With Linux 5.10 Punts Year 2038 Problem To The Year 2486
October 15, 2020
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XFS-Linux-5.10

There are two new on-disk meta-data capabilities for XFS with Linux 5.10:
[...] Support for timestamps now until the year 2486.

This now allows XFS to run well past the Year 2038 problem (where storing the time since 1970 in seconds will no longer fit in a signed 32-bit integer and thus wraparound) to now the Year 2486. Making a new XFS file-system with bigtime enabled allows a timestamp range from December 1901 to July 2486 rather than December 1901 to January 2038. For preserving backwards compatibility, the big timestamps feature is not currently enabled by default.
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