Year 2038 problem [LWN.net]

Year 2038 problem

Posted Dec 9, 2004 5:48 UTC (Thu) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379)
Parent article: Fedora Core 3 on AMD64

That's because on January 19, 2038, at 03:14:07 GMT, exactly 2³¹ seconds will have passed since the beginning of the UNIX epoch on January 1st, 1970. One second later, all 32-bit UNIX systems will revert back to the year 1970. We'll leave it to your imagination as to what will happen unless you migrate your data and applications to a 64-bit system before then.

Well to be fair, 32-bit systems could convert time_t to a 64-bit type instead of upgrading the system to a 64-bit processor. You would of course still need to modify the system libraries and applications however.

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Year 2038 problem

Posted Dec 10, 2004 20:58 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

That still won't fix broken binaries that shove time_t into a 32-bit int.

Year 2038 problem

Posted Dec 11, 2004 20:15 UTC (Sat) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217) [Link]

True, but broken binaries will still be broken on a 64-bit system. There is no hope for existing 32-bit binaries.