Re: Setting monotonic time?

On Wed, 3 Oct 2018, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

On Wed, 3 Oct 2018, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

quoted

Direct access to hardware/drivers and not through an abstraction like
the vfs (an abstraction over block devices) can legitimately be handled
by hotplug events.  I unplug one keyboard I plug in another.

I don't know if the input layer is more of a general abstraction
or more of a hardware device.  I have not dug into it but my guess
is abstraction from what I have heard.

The scary difficulty here is if after restart input is reporting times
in CLOCK_MONOTONIC and the applications in the namespace are talking
about times in CLOCK_MONOTONIC_SYNC.  Then there is an issue.  As even
with a fixed offset the times don't match up.

So a time namespace absolutely needs to do is figure out how to deal
with all of the kernel interfaces reporting times and figure out how to
report them in the current time namespace.

So you want to talk to Arnd who is leading the y2038 effort. He knowns how
many and which interfaces are involved aside of the obvious core timer
ones. It's quite an amount and the problem is that you really need to do
that at the interface level, because many of those time stamps are taken in
contexts which are completely oblivious of name spaces. Ditto for timeouts
and similar things which are handed in through these interfaces.

Plus you have to make sure, that any new interface will have that
treatment. For y2038 that's easy as we just require to use timespec64 for
new ones. For your problem that's not so trivial.

Thanks,

	tglx