On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 10:29:35AM +0100, Ansgar wrote:
For arm* and mips*, we mostly seem to be talking about special-purpose systems where just switching to a new architecture/port doesn't seem to be that much as a problem as for i386. I think rebuilding the world and breaking ABI might thus be acceptable there.
Historically those systems have had major issues with upgrades due to things like proprietary kernel patches that aren't available for newer releases. In practical terms, would trying to avoid a new architecture provide much benefit (especially in terms of the amount of work it would take)? I suspect that if you have a 25 year old embedded system in 2038, the availability of a 64 bit time interface in the C library of a general purpose linux distribution that's compiled for your CPU's instruction set is going to be the least of your maintenance problems.
i386 seems different.
i386 should just stay a relic. I don't see any use case for i386 in 2038 that doesn't involve trying to run a binary that can't be recompiled, and the only solution for that involves virtualization of the old ABI in a time-shifted environment.