On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 12:19 PM gregkh gregkh@linuxfoundation.org wrote:
On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 11:48:12AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 10:45 AM gregkh gregkh@linuxfoundation.org wrote:
On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 10:04:24AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 10:00 AM gregkh@linuxfoundation.org wrote:
When you pick the next LTS kernel, that version may also be a target for backporting all the syscall patches, but it's likely still a lot of work that we should discuss once we get there, and backporting just a subset of the syscall patches is rather pointless as the resulting kernel will still break in 2038.
4.19 is going to be the next LTS kernel. Odds are if you want a 2038-proof kernel, you can just wait for the LTS I pick next year. Although running a 18-year-old kernel isn't probably a wise idea anyway :)
Wise or not, it's going to be done: WRT54g was a popular wireless router back in 2003, running linux-2.4.1, and I'm sure some of them are still around having never been upgraded. Their owners would be slightly annoyed if it happened to stop working next year when that kernel has reached its drinking age. If you buy an Amazon Kindle today, it probably still runs a 3.0.17 kernel from 2011 (source: wikipedia; my older model is still on 2.6.31). Nobody is ever worried about root exploits on those devices, but it would be a shame if one stops working and takes a collection of downloaded books with it that might not be downloadable any more after 10 years of use.
As an estimate, we may have a thousand times more products that get designed with a years-old kernel now than in 2003. When they get sold for 2 to 10 years each before taken off the market, you end up with a lot of new things in stores running 4.19 years from now, and many of those TV sets, power sockets, airliners, solar panels, traffic lights, bulldozers, and elevator doors will seem absolutely fine on January 18, 2038 running 32-bit user space, but then "suddenly all cry out in terror before being suddenly silenced" the next day.
That still doesn't mean we can do much about it though: even if we backport all the kernel changes to 4.19, most of the crap embedded stuff using it will also have broken user space. For the moment, we're still busy fixing mainline, we'll see how hard the backport is when that is done.
Arnd