Re: [PATCHSET v6 0/12] Uncached buffered IO

Darrick J. Wong
2024-12-04T05:52:42Z

On Tue, Dec 03, 2024 at 03:41:53PM -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 12/3/24 3:16 PM, Christoph Lameter (Ampere) wrote:
> > On Tue, 3 Dec 2024, Jens Axboe wrote:
> >
> >> I actually did consider using some form of temporal, as it's the only
> >> other name I liked. But I do think cached_uncached becomes pretty
> >> unwieldy. Which is why I just stuck with uncached. Yes I know it means
> >> different things in different circles, but probably mostly an overlap
> >> with deeper technical things like that. An honestly almost impossible to
> >> avoid overlap these days, everything has been used already :-)
> >>
> >> IOW, I think uncached is probably still the most descriptive thing out
> >> there, even if I'm certainly open to entertaining other names. Just not
> >> anything yet that has really resonated with me.
> >
> > How about calling this a "transitory" page? It means fleeting, not
> > persistent and I think we have not used that term with a page/folio yet.
>
> I also hit the thesaurus ;-)
>
> I'm honestly not too worried about the internal name, as developers can
> figure that out. It's more about presenting an external name that sys
> developers will not need a lot of explaining to know what it's about.
> And something that isn't too long. BRIEFLY_CACHED? TRANSIENT_CACHE?
>
> Dunno, I keep going back to uncached as it's pretty easy to grok!

<shrug> RWF_DONTCACHE, to match {I,DCACHE}_DONTCACHE ? ;)

They sound pretty similar ("load this so I can do something with it,
evict it immediately if possible") though I wouldn't rely on people
outside the kernel being familiar with the existing dontcaches.

--D

> --
> Jens Axboe
>
>