Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Dealing with 2038

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 10:39:13PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday 09 May 2014 11:10:43 Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > On Thu, May 08, 2014 at 09:37:06PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > > 
> > > LFS is far from universally supported by applications, 17 years after it
> > > was standardised.  In fact, many applications recently regressed due to
> > > a broken test for LFS in autoconf <https://bugs.debian.org/742780>.  It
> > > doesn't seem like a good example to follow.
> > 
> > Yes, that was my point.
> > 
> > > However this is done, almost every library that includes time_t in its
> > > API will change ABI.  I say 'almost' because glibc will probably use
> > > symbol versioning or mangling to maintain binary compatibility, but most
> > > library maintainers won't go to that trouble.
> > 
> > Agreed.  This is why I'm not sure anything other than a hard ABI break
> > is realistic.  Yes, it's incredibly painful, and the distro's will
> > probably be very unhappy, but I suspect the alternatives are worse.
> > The only real question is do we start trying to deal with the pain
> > now, or in 2020, or in 2030, or 2035, or even worse, in 2037....
> > 
> > Given what what I saw with Y2K, if I was going to participate in a
> > betting pool on the question, I'd probably put my money down for 2035
> > or so.  :-/
> 
> I think an important distinction is that the majority of systems that
> will be seriously affected are embedded machines, which run a custom
> user space anyway.
> 
> x86-32 PCs and end-user distros are going to be largely extinct
> in a couple of years and replaced by x64-64 or arm64 depending
> on who you ask, and arm32 Android phones are going to be
> replaced with arm64 hardware shortly after, or they see an ABI
> break before then anyway.
> The typical embedded machines don't even use glibc, and they
> cross-build everything from source.

In particular, even systems that want some of the properties of 32-bit
on 64-bit hardware can use x32; the concern is with new systems that
don't support 64-bit at all.  Hence why we need to solve the problem
*today*, so that the devices we're building in the next few years will
survive 2038.

- Josh Triplett