Re: Accelerating Y2038 glibc fixes

[Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 8:09 AM Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> * Wolfgang Denk:
>
> > In message <874l3mjgi6.fsf@oldenburg2.str.redhat.com> you wrote:
> >>
> >> One difficult trade-off is that for you, this is just one-time
> >> enablement work, but the regular contributors will be stuck with the
> >> code you add forever.  Especially since it touches 64-bit architectures
> >> as well.
> >
> > I am aware of this, and I'm willing to go all necessary procedures
> > to get things right.  If someone points out a problem, we can
> > address it, and move on.  But we haven't seen any progress for a
> > long time...
>
> This is not what I meant, or maybe I'm misunderstanding you.  Are you
> offering a long-term collaboration on a varied range of topics?  Or just
> this one contribution of a single feature?
>
> >> For me personally, the whole project is quite baffling.  I'm interested
> >> in 32-bit changes only to support legacy binaries, and this is new work
> >> targeting new binaries.
> >
> > Indeed it is easy for all the big distros who dropped (at least
> > commercial) support for 32 bit systems years ago.
>
> Red Hat still supports 32-bit legacy applications.  I'm sure SUSE does
> as well.
>
> Newer operating system releases do not come with a 32-bit kernel
> anymore, but we have a 32-bit userspace (mostly consisting of libraries
> to support existing legacy application), so we still need glibc.

I should point out a recent case where Ubuntu mentioned they would be
removing the 32bit userspace and some closed source commerical
software (Steam) said they would be pulling support for Ubuntu.  This
forced Ubuntu to change their mind.
This happened within the last few weeks.  I don't know if this is
something we as glibc project as to worry about but it does give
second thoughts to the bigger distros at removing 32bit userland
support or even supporting a new framented ABI.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski

>
> > I think this is part of the problem - the big distros are not really
> > interested in this work, they see it only as a nuisance to their
> > business cases.  I cannot stop myself from stating that such an
> > approach is egotistic at best, if not ignorant, or both.
>
> I would even go one step further: For i386, the upcoming ABI
> fragmentation impacts our users even if they are never going to use the
> new capabilities.
>
> There also appears to be an expectation that all applications which
> invoke the futex system call directly need to be changed at the source
> code level.  This will affect many upstream projects, even if they
> primarily target 64-bit architectures.
>
> Thanks,
> Florian