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> Some of the final steps in this transition for the core kernel have been posted, and seem likely to be merged for 5.1.

This doesn't sound as good as they wanted it to sound. I thought they were already save.

On the other hand, planned obsolescence could help and nobody is using 20 year old kernels in 2038 anymore. Hopefully.

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This is only for 32-bit systems. 64-bit systems have always used a 64-bit timestamp.

The difficulty is that the ABI defines a 32-bit timestamp on 32-bit kernels so that can't easily be changed without breaking backwards compatibility. That's what this post is about.

So for desktops and servers this has been solved for years already. I don't know how prevalent 32-bit is in embedded versus 64-bit.

The popular Raspberry Pi platform only started shipping with a 64-bit ARM cpu in 2016, and ARM chipsets with 64-bit support only started appearing around 2012/2013. So I'd expect many new embedded platforms to continue using 32-bit systems well into the next decade.

There are still probably billions of devices made each year with 8 bit microcontrollers that are decades old designs. We won't be free of 32bit ARM until the turn of the century.

On the other hand, current mysql has this problem now, still unfixed, even running in 64 bit environments. https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=12654

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