Re: [PATCH v1 0/4] Adjust wording for NUMA vs. socket ID in DPDK

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>]

26/11/2024 14:14, Anatoly Burakov:
> While initially, DPDK has used the term "socket ID" to refer to physical package
> ID, the last time DPDK read "physical_package_id" for socket ID was ~9 years
> ago, so it's been a while since we've actually switched over to using the term
> "socket" to mean "NUMA node".
> 
> This wasn't a problem before, as most systems had one NUMA node per physical
> socket. However, in the last few years, more and more systems have multiple NUMA
> nodes per physical CPU socket. Since DPDK used NUMA nodes already, the
> transition was pretty seamless, however now we're faced with a situation when
> most of our documentation still uses outdated terms, and our API is ripe with
> references to "sockets" when in actuality we mean "NUMA nodes". This could be a
> source of confusion.
> 
> While completely renaming all of our API's would be a huge effort, will take a
> long time and arguably wouldn't even be worth the API breakages (given that this
> mismatch between terminology and reality is implicitly understood by most people
> working on DPDK, and so this isn't so much of a problem in practice), we can do
> some tweaks around the edges and at least document this unfortunate reality.
> 
> This patchset suggests the following changes:
> 
> - Update rte_socket/rte_lcore documentation to refer to NUMA nodes rather than
> sockets
> - Rename internal structures' fields to better reflect this intention
> - Rename --socket-mem/--socket-limit flags to refer to NUMA rather than sockets
> 
> The documentation is updated to refer to new EAL flags, but is otherwise left
> untouched, and instead the entry in "glossary" is amended to indicate that when
> DPDK documentation refers to "sockets", it actually means "NUMA ID's". As next
> steps, we could rename all API parameters to refer to NUMA ID rather than socket
> ID - this would not break neither API nor ABI, and instead would be a
> documentation change in practice.

I agree with this direction.
Less confusion is always better.
Please continue.

Nobody complained about this path in 6 months,
so it is applied with removal of some old useless messages in docs:
	EAL: Detected lcore 0 on socket 0

Thanks.