Can't create timers longer than ~71 minutes

[Ondrej Zajicek]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 07:55:07PM +1000, Felix Friedlander via Bird-users wrote:
> I encountered this issue when setting up the mrt protocol to periodically
> dump routing tables. Despite specifying "period 28800", which should log
> every 28,800 seconds = 8 hours, dumps were being saved every 50-ish minutes.
> 
> It appears this is because timers (defined in lib/timer.h) currently store
> their interval ("recurrent") in microseconds as a uint - on most platforms,
> a 32-bit integer. Naturally, 28,800,000,000 µs taken mod 2^32 gives
> 3,030,196,224 µs, or ~50.5 minutes.
> 
> As far as I can tell, this means bird's timers (on 32-bit and LP64
> platforms) can't wait any longer than 2^32 µs, or ~71.6 minutes. I imagine
> for many uses this is fine, but for scheduling periodic events, it's not
> ideal - exporting or syncing some data a handful of times a day (or less!)
> seems like a sensible thing to want to do.
> 
> Increasing this to 64 bits seems easy enough - does someone know otherwise?
> Or have a better idea?

Hi

You are right. It was okay for most other purposes, but for MRT periods
it makes sense to use full 64b range.

Fixed: https://gitlab.nic.cz/labs/bird/-/commit/acbdc29d57373a42a512b505c7d4169fd9ca2bee

Can you check if that fixes your issue?

-- 
Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo

Ondrej 'Santiago' Zajicek (email: santiago at crfreenet.org)
"To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."