All, I recently ran into a bug with an older kernel where xtime's tv_nsec field had accumulated more then 2 seconds worth of time. The timespec's tv_nsec is a signed long, however gettimeofday() treats it as an unsigned long. Thus when the failure occured, very strange and difficult to debug time problems occurred.
The main cause of the problem I was seeing is already fixed in mainline, however just to be safe, I figured the following patch would be wise. I only audited i386 and x86_64, however other arches probably could have similar signed problems as well. Please let me know if you have any further comments or feedback. thanks -john linux-2.6.13_signed-tv_nsec_A0.patch ==================================== diff --git a/arch/i386/kernel/time.c b/arch/i386/kernel/time.c --- a/arch/i386/kernel/time.c +++ b/arch/i386/kernel/time.c @@ -156,7 +156,7 @@ void do_gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv) usec += lost * (USEC_PER_SEC / HZ); sec = xtime.tv_sec; - usec += (xtime.tv_nsec / 1000); + usec += (unsigned long)xtime.tv_nsec / 1000; } while (read_seqretry(&xtime_lock, seq)); while (usec >= 1000000) { diff --git a/arch/x86_64/kernel/time.c b/arch/x86_64/kernel/time.c --- a/arch/x86_64/kernel/time.c +++ b/arch/x86_64/kernel/time.c @@ -128,7 +128,7 @@ void do_gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv) seq = read_seqbegin(&xtime_lock); sec = xtime.tv_sec; - usec = xtime.tv_nsec / 1000; + usec = (unsigned long)xtime.tv_nsec / 1000; /* i386 does some correction here to keep the clock monotonous even when ntpd is fixing drift. diff --git a/kernel/timer.c b/kernel/timer.c --- a/kernel/timer.c +++ b/kernel/timer.c @@ -824,7 +824,7 @@ static void update_wall_time(unsigned lo do { ticks--; update_wall_time_one_tick(); - if (xtime.tv_nsec >= 1000000000) { + if ((unsigned long)xtime.tv_nsec >= 1000000000) { xtime.tv_nsec -= 1000000000; xtime.tv_sec++; second_overflow(); - 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/