Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology

Geert Uytterhoeven
2020-07-06T07:54:12Z

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 9:22 AM Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 06, 2020 at 05:10:37PM +1000, NeilBrown wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 04 2020, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > Another suggestion for "slave" replacement should be "device". This is in
> > > the context of the w1 bus which is by far the largest user of the
> > > master/slave terminology in the kernel.

W1 the largest? Really?

> >
> > Ugh. Please, no. "device" doesn't mean anything, in that you can use
> > it to refer to any thing. (i.e. it is almost semantically equivalent to
> > "thing").
>
> Context is everything, you can have a "controller" and a "device" that
> the controller controls. These are common terms in many specs today,

A "controller" is also any block of electronics that performs a function
involving a state machine.
So for SPI and I2C, we'll have Linux drivers talking to an "SPI controller
controller", an "SPI device controller", an "I2C controller controller",
and an "I2C device controller".
For W1, Linux is still limited to supporting "W1 controller controllers",
but supporting "W1 device controllers" might be just beyond the horizon...

> look at the USB spec for an example of these terms being used in this
> way for many decades.

And when does the "gadget" enter the show? ;-)

P.S. In Dutch, we just assimilate all English technical words, and
they'll only have that specific meaning. E.g. if someone
talks about the "cloud", even lay people know they're not talking
about those things that may ruin your holiday outside.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds