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

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 06/02/2014 12:55 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>
>> 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.
> 
> I picked these because they are fairly isolated from all other uses,
> in particular since inode times are the only things where we really
> care about times in the distant past or future (decades away as opposed
> to things that happened between boot and shutdown).
> 

If nothing else, I would expect to be able to set the system time to
weird values for testing.  So I'm not so sure I agree with that...

> For other kernel-internal uses, we may be better off migrating to
> a completely different representation, such as nanoseconds since
> boot or the architecture specific ktime_t, but this is really something
> to decide for each subsystem.

Having a bunch of different time representations in the kernel seems
like a real headache...

	-hpa