Re: [PATCH 1/7] x86/vdso: Respect COMPAT_32BIT_TIME

H. Peter Anvin
2026-03-03T18:47:36Z

On 2026-02-27 01:34, Thomas Weißschuh wrote:
>>>
>> The thing about gettimeofday() and time() is that they don't have
>> a 64-bit version and libc implementations are expected to call
>> clock_gettime() instead. The result was that there was never a
>> patch to turn the off either.
>
> gettimeofday() is currently the only way to get the timezone of the kernel.
> But I guess this is a legacy thing anyways. If you say we should drop it,
> let's drop it.
>

The time zone in the kernel has never worked anyway, as it would require the
kernel to contain at least the forward portion of the zoneinfo/tzdata table in
order to actually work correctly. The only plausible use of it would be for
local time-based filesystems like FAT, but I don't think we bother.

A bigger question is whether or not we should omit these from the vDSO
completely (potentially causing link failures) or replace them with stubs
returning -ENOSYS.

-hpa