[ClusterLabs] Coming in Pacemaker 2.0.3: Year 2038 compatibility

[Ken Gaillot]

Hi all,

I wanted to highlight a feature of the next Pacemaker release: it will
be ready for the Year 2038.

I'm sure most people reading this are familiar with the problem.
Representing epoch timestamps (seconds since 1970-01-01) as signed 32-
bit integers will overflow at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, wreaking havoc
and bringing about the collapse of civilization (or at least some
embedded systems).

Most OSes are ready at the kernel and C library levels on 64-bit CPU
architectures. (There's still a lot of work to be done for filesystems
and applications, and 32-bit architectures may never be fixed.)

Until now, Pacemaker has not been Y2038-ready, storing
timestamps insufficiently in memory and the CIB. This is expected to be
fully remedied in 2.0.3. So go ahead, set up that rule to put your
cluster in standby at 10:30 p.m. March 15, 2040. :-)

I'm planning to start the 2.0.3 release cycle in about a month.

This change will not be backported to the 1.1 series, which is expected
to be end-of-life sometime in the next few years.
-- 
Ken Gaillot <kgaillot at redhat.com>