On Thursday 14 January 2016 23:46:16 Arnd Bergmann wrote:
I'm not following the line of thought here. We have some users that want ext4 to mount old file system images without long inodes writable, because they don't care about the 2038 problem. We also have other users that want to force the same file system image to be read-only because they want to ensure that it does not stop working correctly when the time overflow happens while the fs is mounted.
If you don't want a compile-time option for it, how do you suggest we decide which case we have?
In case that came across wrong, I'm assuming that the first user also wants all the system calls enabled that pass 32-bit time_t values, while the second one wants them all left out from the kernel to ensure that no user space program gets incorrect data. This could be done using a sysctl of course, but I still think we want a compile-time option for the syscalls for clarity, and I would simply use the same compile-time option to determine the behavior of the file system, network protocols and device drivers that deal with 32-bit timestamps outside of the kernel.
Arnd