Hi! > >>You say there is "no danger of overflow", and I mostly > >>agree that once > >>we're talking about 64-bit values, the overflow issue > >>simply doesn't > >>exist, and furthermore the difference between 63 and > >>64 bits is not really > >>relevant, so there's no major reason to actively avoid > >>signed entries. > >> > >>So in that sense, it all sounds perfectly sane. And > >>I'm definitely not > >>sure your "292 years after bootup" worry is really > >>worth even considering. > >> > > > >I would hate to tell mission control for Mankind's > >first mission to another > >star to reboot every 200 years because "there is no > >need to worry about it." > > > >As a matter of principle an OS should never need a > >reboot (with exception for upgrading). If you say you > >have to reboot every 200 years, why not every 100? > >Every 50? .... Every 45 days (you know what I am > >referring to :-) ? > > There's always going to be an upper limit on the > representation of time. At least until we figure out > how to implement infinity properly.
There's also upper limit on life time of this universe. 1000 bits is certainly enough to represent that in u-seconds. Also notice that current cpus were not designed to work 300 years. When we have hw designed for 50 years+, we can start to worry. Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/