{"id":17298,"date":"2020-03-02T12:33:31","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T12:33:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rbsitsoftwaresolution.com\/blog\/linux-is-ready-for-the-end-of-time.html"},"modified":"2020-03-02T12:33:31","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T12:33:31","slug":"linux-is-ready-for-the-end-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/linux-is-ready-for-the-end-of-time.html","title":{"rendered":"Linux is ready for the end of time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

\tTwenty years later, the Y2K bug is making a comeback<\/span>
\n\tDaphne Leprince-Ringuet explains that, back in 2000, some developers left the Y2K issue until later \u2013- and later has now arrived. Read more: https:\/\/zd.net\/2FP5r02<\/span>
\n\t\"\"<\/p>\n

On 03:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, aka Coordinated Universal Time) January 19, 2038 (that’s a Tuesday), the world ends. Well, not in the biblical Book of Revelations sense. But, what will happen is the value for time in 32-bit based Unix-based operating systems, like Linux and older versions of macOS, runs out of numbers and starts counting time with negative numbers. That’s not good.\u00a0 We can expect 32-bit computers running these operating systems to have fits. Fortunately, Linux’s developers already had a fix ready to go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem starts with how Unix tells time. Unix, and its relations — Linux, macOS, and other POSIX-compatible operating systems — date the beginning of time from the Epoch: 00:00:00 GMT on January 1, 1970. The Unix family measures time by the number of seconds since the Epoch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So far, so good. But, since Unix and family started out as 32-bit operating systems, time’s value is kept as a single signed 32-bit integer number. Those are a lot of seconds, but just like the last century’s Y2K bug<\/a>, it’s not enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Linux developers have seen this coming for decades. So, Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann and others have been working on a repair. These corrections are now in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel. Bergmann explained, “Linux-5.6, or my backport of the patches to 5.4, should be the first release that can serve as a base for a 32-bit system designed to run beyond year 2038<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

There are some caveats:<\/p>\n