Re: Why do we still have 32 bit counters? Interrupt counters overflow within 50 days

[Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2014, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

> So if you want to fix that as well, you really need to think about the
> 32 bit case because there is no serialization for the interrupts which
> are delivered directly from their own vector. And no, we should not
> diverge 32 and 64 bit artificially here simply because the same 50
> days wrap applies to both.

Is it a divergence if both 64bit and 32 bit are unsing unsigned long?

>
> I really start to wonder whether all this is worth the trouble. It has
> been this way forever and 1k timer interrupts per second is not really
> a new thing either. So we did not change anything which suddenly makes
> tools confused.

Tools expect the number of interrupt to increase linearly and not jump by
2^32 once in awhile. There are functions in the kernel (/proc/stat) that
sum up various interrupt counters and that are types unsigned long. These
larger numbers can suddenly jump by 2^32. Its pretty unusual for a 64 bit
conter to do that and it requires some head scratching until we figured
that one out.