[RFC 00/32] making inode time stamps y2038 ready

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 06/02/2014 12:19 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Monday 02 June 2014 13:52:19 Joseph S. Myers wrote:
>> On Fri, 30 May 2014, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>
>>> a) is this the right approach in general? The previous discussion
>>>    pointed this way, but there may be other opinions.
>>
>> The syscall changes seem like the sort of thing I'd expect, although 
>> patches adding new syscalls or otherwise affecting the kernel/userspace 
>> interface (as opposed to those relating to an individual filesystem) 
>> should go to linux-api as well as other relevant lists.
> 
> Ok. Sorry about missing linux-api, I confused it with linux-arch, which
> may not be as relevant here, except for the one question whether we
> actually want to have the new ABI on all 32-bit architectures or only
> as an opt-in for those that expect to stay around for another 24 years.
> 
> Two more questions for you:
> 
> - are you (and others) happy with adding this type of stat syscall
>   (fstatat64/fstat64) as opposed to the more generic xstat that has
>   been discussed in the past and that never made it through the bike-
>   shedding discussion?
> 
> - once we have enough buy-in from reviewers to merge this initial
>   series, should we proceed to define rest of the syscall ABI
>   (minus driver ioctls) so glibc and kernel can do the conversion
>   on top of that, or should we better try to do things one syscall
>   family at a time and actually get the kernel to handle them
>   correctly internally?
> 

The bit that is really going to hurt is every single ioctl that uses a
timespec.

Honestly, though, I really don't understand the point with "struct
inode_time".  It seems like the zeroeth-order thing is to change the
kernel internal version of struct timespec to have a 64-bit time... it
isn't just about inodes.  We then should be explicit about the external
uses of time, and use accessors.

	-hpa