Year 2038 time set problem

[greg@kroah.com (Greg KH)]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2018 at 03:35:24PM +0000, Alex Arvelaez wrote:
> On Mar 5, 2018 6:30 AM, Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@petrovitsch.priv.at> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 2018-03-05 at 02:35 +0000, Alex Arvelaez wrote:
> > [...]
> > > Device makers don't love updating their devices, I don't see how you
> > > could fix that sadly. What's your solution?
> >
> > It's much worse for varying reasons.
> >
> > And why should "we" (whoever that is) fix the problems of others?
> 
> I wasn't saying the kernel community should take on this problem. I
> was saying the kernel community can't possibly fix this problem.

We can't fix it "completely", but we can do a lot to help make it
easier.

And we have, over 12 years ago we made the "Cambridge Promise" at a
kernel summit where we said "We make the guarantee that updating to anew
kernel will not break your system or userspace".  Yes we sometimes mess
up, but we try our best to always fix it.

We came up with the idea of the "stable" kernels, containing bugfixes to
make it easier for companies to use and rely on for their devices.  The
list of rules for the stable kernel are easy to understand and everyone
can see all patches being applied so they know if they need to update
their devices or not.

Then, when we realized that people want to stick to a specific kernel
version for a longer period of time than just 3 months, we came out with
the idea of "Long Term Supported" kernels to help those companies out.

Then, when 2 years was too short (SoC companies are horrid in getting
their code upstream), I promised to try to maintain a kernel release for
6 years for them.  Now if they don't use that kernel in their devices (I
have a whole raft of them here to watch if they update or not) that
experiment will not be repeated, but for now we are trying to help
companies out here.

If this latest attempt doesn't work well, then we will continue to try
to come up with solutions for this problem, while actively working with
the device makers as we rely on them as well, this isn't a one-way
street, it's an ecosystem.  Those makers are the community just as much
as any other Linux user.

And at the same time as all of the above, we are adding hardening
features to make any bugs that are later found, not be a real issue.
That's been the case for many of the recently found bugs lately.  If
only the device makers would have actually turned those options on.  So
go enable those options, to ignore them is almost as foolish as not
updating the kernel.

Sorry for the rant, we are trying to make this dirt simple and easy for
people to update, and be protected with the releases they do run.

greg k-h