What Does EOVERFLOW Mean?

The EOVERFLOW return value is returned from a system call whenever one or more fields of the data structure used to pass information out of the kernel is too small to hold the value.

A number of 32-bit system calls now return EOVERFLOW when faced with large objects on the 64-bit kernel. While this was already true when dealing with large files, the fact that daddr_t, dev_t, time_t, and its derivative types struct timeval and timespec_t now contain 64-bit quantities might mean more EOVERFLOW return values are observed by 32-bit applications.