Re: [PATCH 04/23] vfs: Introduce infrastructure for revoking a file

Nick Piggin
2009-06-03T06:37:32Z

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 01:52:46PM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
>
> > On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Nick Piggin wrote:
> >>
> >> Why is it called hotplug? Does it have anything to do with hardware?
> >> Because every concurrently changed software data structure in the
> >> kernel can be "hot"-modified, right?
> >>
> >> Wouldn't file_revoke_lock be more appropriate?
> >
> > I agree, "hotplug" just sounds crazy. It's "open" and "revoke", not
> > "plug" and "unplug".
>
> I guess this shows my bias in triggering this code path from pci
> hotunplug. Instead of with some system call.
>
> I'm not married to the name. I wanted file_lock but that is already
> used, and I did call the method revoke.

Definitely it is not going to be called hotplug in the generic
vfs layer :)

> The only place where hotplug gives a useful hint is that it makes it
> clear we really are disconnecting the file descriptor from what lies
> below it.

Isn't that hotUNplug?

But anyway hot plug/unplug is a purely hardware concept. Revoke
for "unplug", please, including naming of patches, changelogs,
and locks etc.

> We can't do some weird thing like keep the underlying object.
> Because the underlying object is gone.