From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0smp i686) Description of problem: the system uptime as displayed by w and top (possibly others) is incorrect after system uptime is greater than 512 days,it wraps back to 0 (mod 512?) How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.boot system 2.drink coffee for 18 months 3.look at system uptime Actual Results: $ w 1:42pm up 18 days, 17:25, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Expected Results: $ w 1:42pm up 516 days, 17:25, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Additional info: "top" also displays uptime with the same error, it's not specific to w It's occuring on more than one system. It's a minor problem, how many systems are up for more than 500 days? But when I tried to show the NT sysadmin what uptime SHOULD look like, the damn thing showed 17 days ;-) last boot was Dec 19,1999
This is somehow not a bug but normal. The internal kernel uptime timer (jiffies) wraps at around 497 days to 0 (32 bit unsigned integer, counting 100 times per second on x86). Sad, but true. ;-)