Taken from http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5079



signed long ranges from -2.147.483.648 to 2.147.483.647 on x86 32bit

10000011110110100100111110111101 .. -2,082,844,739
10000011110110100100111110111101 ..  2,212,122,557 <- this currently gets
stored on the disk but when converting it to a 64bit signed long value it loses
its sign and becomes positive.

Cc: Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>
Cc: <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>

Andreas says:

This patch is now treating timestamps with the high bit set as negative
times (before Jan 1, 1970).  This means we lose 1/2 of the possible range
of timestamps (lopping off 68 years before unix timestamp overflow -
now only 30 years away :-) to handle the extremely rare case of setting
timestamps into the distant past.

If we are only interested in fixing the underflow case, we could just
limit the values to 0 instead of storing negative values.  At worst this
will skew the timestamp by a few hours for timezones in the far east
(files would still show Jan 1, 1970 in "ls -l" output).

That said, it seems 32-bit systems (mine at least) allow files to be set
into the past (01/01/1907 works fine) so it seems this patch is bringing
the x86_64 behaviour into sync with other kernels.

On the plus side, we have a patch that is ready to add nanosecond timestamps
to ext3 and as an added bonus adds 2 high bits to the on-disk timestamp so
this extends the maximum date to 2242.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>