On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 05:55:11PM -0400, Colin McGregor via Talk wrote:
Below is a story about where Debian 13 (aka: "Trixie") stands regarding the Y2038 issue. In quick summary the Y2038 issue is that time in the current stable Debian release (and to the best of my knowledge all other Linux distributions) stores time as a 32 bit number with the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 AD. After 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038 you may have Linux systems thinking it is 1970.
All 32 bit linux distributions. 64 architectures always used 64 bit time and are hence not effected. This is only a concern for 32 bit x86 (which Debian is explicitly NOT changing since they only intend to support it as a legacy compatibility platform running on 64 bit x86 systems) and 32 bit arm. 32 bit powerpc seems essentially dead. Not sure anyone ever really bothered with mips. As they said: "Debian is primarily concerned about the armhf architecture, as it's the 32-bit architecture most likely to still be getting significant usage in new systems over the next decade. But i386, armel, mipsel (and the hppa, hurd-i386, powerpc, m68k and sh4 ports) are also affected. Other 32-bit architectures already use 64-bit time: x32, riscv32, arc and loong32. 64-bit architectures are not affected by the Y2k38 problem, but they are affected by this transition." -- Len Sorensen