Re: Maximum uptime 497 days?

From: Oliver Fromme (olli_at_lurza.secnetix.de)
Date: 06/28/04

  • Next message: Ken Smith: "Re: Maximum uptime 497 days?" 
    Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:03:28 +0200 (CEST)
To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG

    Rob <stopspam@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
    > By accident I happen to come across this remarkable limit of
    > uptime registration for FreeBSD systems. After 497 days, the
    > timer jumps to zero again.
    >
    > 497 days is less than a 1.5 years !

    I'd be very embarrassed to have machines with that a high
    uptime -- It means that they haven't been updated for that
    a long time and are probably full of security holes. ;-)

    > Has this been fixed in newer versions of FreeBSD (stable and/or
    > current) ? Or is there a hardware limitation (CPU?) that does
    > not allow this?

    I'm pretty certain I have seen FreeBSD machines with more
    that 497 days of uptime. The boot time is stored as a
    struct timeval in sysctl kern.boottime, which is enough for
    several decades.

    Which program did you use to display the uptime? It's pro-
    bably a bug in that program, not in freeBSD.

    I guess that that program calculates the uptime with 1/100s
    precision and stores it in a 32bit int. That would explain
    the 497 days limit: 2^32 / 24 / 60 / 60 / 100 == 497.1.

    Best regards
       Oliver 

    -- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
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        -- Tom Cargil, C++ Journal
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  • Next message: Ken Smith: "Re: Maximum uptime 497 days?"