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News and Advice on the World's Latest Innovations | ZDNET

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/&gt;2038 is for Linux what Y2K was for mainframe and PC computing in 2000, but the fixes are underway to make sure all goes well when that fatal time rolls around.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.&nbsp; We can expect 32-bit computers running these operating systems to have fits. Fortunately, Linux's developers already had a fix ready to go.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;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 , it's not enough.&nbsp;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 ."There are some caveats:In short, there's a lot of clean-up work to be done even after the core problem has been fixed.&nbsp;MacOS has been moving away from 32-bit software for over a decade. But, tt was only in the late 2019 release of , that .&nbsp;Now, you may be wondering&nbsp; -- since we're all running 64-bit computers these days -- why is this even an issue. Well, it's like this. First, many embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are still running 32-bit operating systems. Indeed, by 2038, there will probably still be new 32-bit devices arriving in the market.&nbsp;We also know, thanks to the , that systems you might assume will be dumped into landfills in 18-years will still be alive and well -- and badly misbehaving come the Epoch.But look at this way: After we fix this, we won't have to worry about 64-bit Linux running out of seconds until 15:30:08 GMT Sunday, December 4, 29,227,702,659. Personally, I'm not going to worry about that one.&nbsp;Related Stories:

/&gt;2038 is for Linux what Y2K was for mainframe and PC computing in 2000, but the fixes are underway to make sure all goes well when that fatal time rolls around.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.&nbsp; We can expect 32-bit computers...

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it.His work has been published in everything from highly technical publications (IEEE Computer, ACM NetWorker, Byte) to business publications (eWEEK, InformationWeek, ZDNet) to popular technology (Computer Shopper, PC Magazine, PC World) to the mainstream press (Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, BusinessWeek).

https://www.zdnet.com/meet-the-team/us/steven-j-vaughan-nichols/

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

ZDNet is a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive, along with TechRepublic. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991, as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication owned by CNET Networks.

News and Advice on the World's Latest Innovations | ZDNET

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