Linux Easter Egg - Hidden Dates in the Linux Kernel

In order to prevent the reboot() system call being

called inadvertently, you must pass it a pair of magic values in the first two parameters. The first magic value is 0xfee1dead. The second magic value

is one of:



$ grep LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC include/linux/*.h

include/linux/reboot.h:#define LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC1 0xfee1dead

include/linux/reboot.h:#define LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2 672274793

include/linux/reboot.h:#define LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2A 85072278

include/linux/reboot.h:#define LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2B 369367448

include/linux/reboot.h:#define LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2C 537993216



These are dates of significance to Linus; hint

you can use perl to convert them into dates:



$ perl -e 'print localtime(672274793). "

";'

Sun Apr 21 18:59:53 1991



This is the date that Linus first started writing Linux. The significance of other dates is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)





User Rating: 6.8 6.8/10 with 26 votes Contributed By: Anonymous on 06-04-2005 Reviewed By: sars, David Wolf

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on openSUSE 10.2 by systemz89

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